WTO chief seeks text to advance debate over COVID-19 vaccine
GENEVA (AP) — The World Trade Organization chief appealed to member countries on Wednesday to present and negotiate over a text that could temporarily ease rules that protect COVID-19 vaccine technology, as a way to ramp access to doses, a spokesman said.
Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala spoke to a closed-door meeting of ambassadors from developing and developed countries that have been wrangling over the issue, but agree on the need for wider access to COVID-19 treatments, spokesman Keith Rockwell said.
The WTO’s General Council — made up of ambassadors — was taking up the pivotal issue of a temporary waiver for intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines and other tools that South Africa and India first proposed in October. The idea has gained support in the developing world and among some progressive lawmakers in the West.
“What was striking about today was this very strong declaration by all members on this shared objective — which is ramping up production and distribution of these vaccines and therapeutics and diagnostics in the developing world, where there is a great inequity in terms of of distribution," he told reporters, summarizing the debate.
“I would say most of the members would say this is the most important issue facing our organization today,” Rockwell said.
“I’m not going to put odds on on how likely it is to find an agreement," he said. “But when people begin to voice very clearly their shared objectives, it makes it easier to get to ‘yes.’"
The pace of efforts at the Geneva-based trade body have been outstripped by the speed of the spread of the pandemic. The World Health Organization across town said earlier Wednesday that weekly case counts have been at record highs in the last two weeks.
Rockwell said a WTO panel on intellectual property was set to take up the waiver proposal again at a “tentative” meeting later this month, before a formal meeting on June 8-9.
No consensus -- which is required under WTO rules -- was expected to emerge from the ambassadors’ two-day meeting on Wednesday and Thursday. But Rockwell pointed to a change in tone after months of wrangling.
“I would say that the discussion was far more constructive, pragmatic. It was less emotive and less finger pointing than it had been in the past,” Rockwell said, citing a surge in cases in places like India. "I think that this feeling of everyone-being-in-it- together was being expressed in a way that I had not heard to this point.”
Authors of the proposal, which has faced resistance from many countries with influential pharmaceutical and biotech industries, have been revising it in hopes of making it more palatable.
Rockwell, summarizing comments from Okonjo-Iweala, said she had said it was “incumbent” on member states “to put this revised text on the table so that we can begin text-based negotiations.”
“She’s firmly convinced that once we can sit down with an actual text in front of us, we can find a pragmatic way forward,” he added.
Co-sponsors of the idea were shuttling between different diplomatic missions to make their case, according to a Geneva trade official who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter. A deadlock persists, and opposing sides remain far apart, the official said.
Some proponents saw more hope for the proposal after U.S. President Joe Biden's top trade official, Katherine Tai, said last month that gaping inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines between developed and developing countries were "completely unacceptable,” and that mistakes made in the global response to the HIV pandemic mustn't be repeated.
The argument, part of a long-running debate about intellectual property protections, centers on lifting patents, copyrights, and protections for industrial design and confidential information to help expand the production and deployment of vaccines during supply shortages. The aim is to suspend the rules for several years, just long enough to beat down the pandemic.
The issue has become more pressing with a surge in cases in India, the world’s second-most populous country and a key producer of vaccines, including one for COVID-19 that relies on technology from Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical maker AstraZeneca.
Proponents, including WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, note that such waivers are part of the WTO toolbox and insist there’s no better time to use them than during the once-in-a-century pandemic that has taken 3.2 million lives, infected more than 437 million people and devastated economies.
Opponents say a waiver would be no panacea. They insist that production of COVID-19 vaccines is complex and simply can’t be ramped up by easing intellectual property and say lifting protections could hurt future innovation.
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