“Intellectual Property Rights and the Unfair Distribution of Covid-19 Vaccines”

On May 5, 2023, when the WHO declared the end of the emergency for Covid-19, 70% of the world population (30% in low-income countries) had received at least one dose of vaccine, reporting seven million deaths globally.

Decades of public investment in research and training of advanced human resources generated the necessary knowledge for anti-Covid-19 vaccines. The emergency financial support from some governments (USA, UK, Germany, China) to the pharmaceutical industry, as well as the collaborative public-private development of clinical trials, achieved the fastest transfer of knowledge for the generation of various vaccines that have been demonstrated to be effective and safe. And the infrastructure and agility of the private company facilitated the massive application of this product in the countries that could acquire it, managing to rapidly lower the rate of hospitalization and death in its population.

Unfortunately, intellectual property rights, which the vast majority of the world’s countries signed when we became part of the World Trade Organization (WTO), allowed the pharmaceutical industry to set price conditions and decide the distribution of vaccines. And the “flexibilities” considered by the WTO did not work, preventing, for example, some Canadian biotechnology companies from producing vaccines for Bolivia or from producing them in WHO-validated laboratories in India and South Africa. In this period, greed prevailed over solidarity, determining the maintenance of suffering and emergency for more than three years. Neither the States nor the WHO managed to assert the public investment without which the pharmaceutical industries would not have been able to produce the vaccines that today generate billions in profits.

This situation is highly unfair and morally unacceptable. Citizens with their taxes finance the vaccines, but then they have no control over the final product. This is how the incompetence of States and international governance organizations, such as the WHO itself, alert us to how we will be able to face the main threats to the survival of humanity, such as atomic wars or global warming.

Although the WHO was slow to sound the alarm in the face of this pandemic, the conclusion is that it must be strengthened and given more powers to this and other global governance organizations, so that they help humanity face the current and not so distant threats to survival.

By Catterina Ferreccio, Director of the Doctoral Program in Epidemiology, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile