Why US Sanctions on Cuba’s Biotech Industry are Hindering Global Health Security

The story of how Cuba was systematically blocked in its quest to make its own highly effective vaccines widely available offers crucial lessons.

How can humanity prevent the next pandemic from being as disastrous as this one, in which up to 15 million people have died? Last week, the countries of the World Health Organization met in Geneva to begin discussing a pandemic preparedness agreement. A primary goal is to rapidly develop new cures and vaccines, and the ability to deliver them to everyone on the planet.

While no one yet knows what recommendations the WHO will ultimately make, it is possible to predict one thing it will not recommend: easing US sanctions on Cuba’s national biotech industry, which has the wherewithal to develop cutting-edge vaccines and treatments. and share them with countries for which it is impossible to pay the premium prices of First World pharmaceutical companies.

This is a mistake.

During the covid-19 crisis, the United States had the opportunity to share its vaccine technology with the world, and failure to do so prolonged the pandemic at home and abroad.

In June 2022, a senior Biden Administration official admitted that the omicron variant, which has been responsible for more than 300,000 deaths in the United States and more than 1.5 million worldwide, might not have emerged if the world had been sufficiently vaccinated in 2021.

What is less well known is that Cuba had the same opportunity to help vaccinate the world. The story of how Cuba was systematically blocked in its quest to make its own highly effective vaccines widely available offers crucial lessons.

The most recent chapter of this story began in the summer of 2021. The delta variant was devastating India and making its way around the world. The new vaccines offered hope, but poorer countries couldn’t get them for love or money.

While the United States and Europe donated doses, their efforts were barely enough to solve the global problem. Crucially, these governments were unable to persuade the companies they had financed to share the technologies that could have allowed other countries to make vaccines on their own.

Against this bleak outlook, it was surprising to learn that Cuba had created two effective coronavirus vaccines from scratch and then promised to share their intellectual property around the world.

“We realized that we were not going to have money to buy vaccines for our people, so we had to make our own, and we had to do it in a very short time,” Rolando Pérez Rodríguez, director of Science and Innovation at BioCubaFarma, told us recently. .

In August 2021, one of the BioCubaFarma laboratories also produced a booster. Both demonstrated more than 90% efficacy, on par with leading Western vaccines.

The cost of developing these vaccines was 50 million dollars, according to BioCubaFarma, well below the billions invested by the United States Government and the hundreds of millions invested by Germany in theirs.

Surprisingly, Cuba eventually exported almost as many doses of vaccines as it used at home, supplying Venezuela, Mexico, Vietnam, Syria, Nicaragua, Belarus, and Iran. But while many countries in Africa and South Asia also desperately needed vaccines, they did not take advantage of Cuba’s offer.

To explain why they did not, we must go back to 1962, when the economic embargo came into effect. [bloqueo] American against Cuba. Since then, escalating sanctions, which the United States has tightened through the application of constant political and financial pressure, have isolated Cuba not only from the United States but also from the world. The severe sanctions for violating those US measures have made institutions and governments routinely comply with them.

Cuba could have asked the WHO to certify its vaccines to make it easier for other countries to buy them with international aid. But he could not afford to compromise with the WHO after President Donald Trump not only repealed the soft sanctions reforms introduced by his predecessor, but also designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism.

This has meant that, even in countries where it is legal to transact with Cuba, few banks are willing to risk heavy fines and criminal penalties for being perceived as supporting terrorism.

Cuba-US relations they are a live political cable, but the new times demand new measures. The world has changed since 1962. The specter that haunts it today is not communism, but another global health emergency.

There is little indication that the Biden Administration will pressure American pharmaceutical companies to share their medical inventions with the world. But President Biden could take a giant step toward global health security by reversing the Trump Administration’s draconian policies toward Cuba.

If it went further, by allowing new exceptions in the US sanctions regime, then Cuba could continue to develop, and share, innovative vaccines and treatments for the world’s diseases.

More than three years later, it is obvious that the world reacted badly to the appearance of the coronavirus, that lives were lost needlessly. But now is the time to prepare for the next pandemic, to set a course for a more equitable distribution of medical technologies. The old embargo [bloqueo] of the United States is not only harming Cuba. It’s hurting the world.

* Achal Prabhala is coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa.

Vitor Ido is a program officer at the Health, Intellectual Property and Biodiversity Program at the South Center in Geneva.