COVID pandemic exposed how medicine monopolies delayed access to vaccines and treatments
During the COVID pandemic 2020-22, AFTINET campaigned on the issue of access to pandemic-related medicines. COVID has demonstrated the limitations of the global health system and the Intellectual WTO Property (IP) regime that shaped the global response to the pandemic. IP rules gave a few pharmaceutical companies twenty-year patents on new COVID vaccines, which meant they controlled both the quantity and prices. Most vaccines were sold to high-income countries at high prices. This resulted in long delays in access to vaccines for low and low-middle income countries leading to lower vaccination rates. There was even less access to treatments when they became available.
Developing countries in October 2020 proposed a temporary waiver of WTO IP rules to share intellectual property and enable global production of more vaccines and treatments at affordable prices for low- and middle-income countries. AFTINET worked with a broad coalition of public health, union, aid and development and human rights organisations to generate public support for this proposal and to lobby the Australian government to support it. We commissioned a survey which showed that most Australian supported the temporary waiver and organised a petition with 50,000 signatures, organised rallies exposing pharmaceutical companies’ profiteering, and pressured the government and opposition parties to state publicly that they would support the waiver. However, at the WTO negotiations the government took a neutral stance, trying to broker a compromise between supporters and opponents of the waiver.
The waiver proposal was delayed for over 18 months by rich countries, lobbied by pharmaceutical companies, until the peak of the pandemic was over. The June 2022 WTO Ministerial decision on the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) was a watered-down version of the waiver originally proposed which had little effect and applied only to vaccines. A decision on COVID treatments and other pandemic-related products was postponed and has still not been made.
In early 2022, for every dose of mRNA vaccine delivered to low-income countries, 56 were delivered to rich countries. Vaccination rates in low-income countries were less than 20% by January 2022, and were still only at 32% in September 2023. These delays contributed to the estimated 17.2 million deaths due to COVID, the majority of which were in low- and low-middle income countries.
The World Health Organisation is now negotiating a Pandemic Agreement to apply to future pandemics, which is intended to learn from the mistakes of the COVID pandemic. AFTINET is lobbying the Australian government to support temporary waivers on monopolies and other actions to share intellectual property and technology for all pandemic-related products, to ensure more equitable access for low- and middle-income countries. See our submission below.
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Updated September 2023.
21 November, 2023: Last week Director General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, encouraged developing countries to put in place “effective mechanisms in their domestic laws” that allow them to use flexibilities in the Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) Agreement in health emergencies.
25 October, 2023: World Trade Organisation (WTO) negotiations which commenced more than 3 years ago on temporarily waiving some intellectual property rules for COVID products like vaccines, treatments and tests have hit multiple roadblocks. Most recently a decision has been delayed in anticipation of a report commissioned by the US.
20 October, 2023 (updated 23 October, 2023): The latest draft of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Pandemic Agreement was released earlier this week. There were concerns it would continue the trend of weakening provisions that we have seen through previous iterations of the agreement.
18 September, 2023: Experts are confident that the Pandemic Agreement, the latest draft of which is being discussed this week, will be adopted in May 2024 at the World Health Assembly meeting but there are doubts on how meaningful the agreement will be.
11 September, 2023: Australia is part of the ongoing World Health Organisation negotiations to build the international response for future pandemics, through both improving the existing International Health Regulations and negotiating a new Global Pandemic Agreement .
7 September, 2023: On August 17, the South African NGO Health Justice Initiative won a huge victory when the Pretoria High Court ruled that South Africa had to make its COVID procurement contracts public.
28 August, 2023: Negotiations to improve the international response for future pandemics are underway through talks for a new World Health Organisation Global Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the existing International Health Regulations.
22 August, 2023: The High Court in Pretoria, South Africa has ruled that Covid vaccine procurement contracts and related documents had to be made public. Judge Anthony Millar said “it is, in my view, self-evident that there is public interest in the disclosure of the records.”
18 August, 2023: The public health organisation Make Medicines Affordable has released a report outlining the affordability of Covid vaccines in 17 middle-income countries between 2021-2022.
28 July, 2023: Despite widespread calls for transparency, to this day, nearly all publicly funded Covid-19 vaccine procurement contracts remain confidential.