While Western countries have largely lifted Covid restrictions and are attempting to put the pandemic behind them, countries in the Global South, where vaccines and treatments are still often hard to come by (e.g., just 11% of the African continent has been vaccinated against Covid-19), have no such privilege. But despite US media’s occasionally stated concern with vaccine equity, the role of pharmaceutical companies in perpetuating this gap is rarely mentioned.
Covax—the vaccine alliance of non-governmental organizations—has established itself as a mainstay of global vaccination efforts. Wealthy nations that have contributed to this charity have touted it as the singular solution to vaccine inequity worldwide. Vaccinating populations that lack protections against Covid-19 saves lives in those countries and deters the emergence of new variants.
A rare op-ed in corporate media (Washington Post, 4/26/21) that criticized at intellectual property rights as a barrier to fighting the pandemic.
But counting on the world’s rich countries to donate doses to low- and middle-income countries has failed to close the chasm of vaccination, infection and death, with billions of doses still needed. As Lori Wallach, then-director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz argued (Washington Post, 4/26/21), the intellectual property (IP) rights to the vaccines—all developed with massive infusions of public money—must be shared freely in order to meet demand:
Pharmaceutical corporations claim the problem is not [IP] barriers, but that companies in developing nations don’t have the skill to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines based on new technologies. This is self-serving and wrong.
Firms in the Global South are already making Covid-19 vaccines. For example, South Africa’s Aspen Pharmacare has produced hundreds of millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, even though only a fraction of those went to South Africans. Other drug corporations simply refuse to work with qualified manufacturers in developing countries, effectively blocking more production.
Big Pharma’s efforts to address vaccine inequity have prioritized profits over people. An op-ed published by the international advocacy group Health Gap (10/8/20) called on Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies to share
all the information, know-how, data and biologic resources needed for other qualified vaccine manufacturers to produce the vaccine economically and at scale to meet global need.
Moderna pledged not to enforce its vaccine patents (though it did not agree to share the know-how to manufacture it); Pfizer has not. When Oxford University created its own vaccine early in the pandemic, the Gates Foundation pressured it to enter an agreement with the British/Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca “that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices” (KHN, 8/24/20). During the pandemic, however, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson (J&J) pledged to sell vaccines philanthropically—pricing doses at not-for-profit prices.
Critics argue that waiving IP protections could jeopardize companies’ ability to obtain the investments needed to carry out their work. This argument evades the fact that government subsidies and contracts have been easy for the private sector to obtain when the state considered a project vital to the national interest and national security. Indeed, vaccine research and development by pharmaceutical companies like Moderna, Pfizer, J&J and others have been supported by infusions of taxpayer money as part of Operation Warp Speed since the start of the pandemic.
A means to what end?
This LA Times article (3/25/22) on vaccine inequity never uses the words “patent” or “intellectual property.”
In their coverage of vaccine equity, corporate media have complained about the lack of funding available for Covax (Vox, 5/20/21; New York Times, 10/6/21; Politico, 2/17/22) and have been somewhat critical of pharmaceutical companies’ inaction on vaccine equity (AP, 7/18/21; USA Today, 12/1/21, 5/21/21; CBS News, 12/5/21). But few corporate news companies have indicated the existence of a pharmaceutical monopoly on Covid-19 vaccines, and reports commonly fail to talk about the importance of sharing vaccine-making technology and expertise with manufacturers (e.g., LA Times, 5/10/21, 3/25/22; ABC News, 6/29/21, 8/16/21).
US media have focused almost exclusively on the funding and logistical challenges that have impeded vaccine delivery around the world. In doing so, they fail to recognize the root of the systemic problem causing inadequate vaccine access throughout the Global South.
Relative to reporting on the pandemic, there has been sparse coverage of vaccine equity. A Nexis search for appearances of “Covax” in transcripts from MSNBC, NBC News, ABC News, CBS News and CNN and in articles published in USA Today, the LA Times, New York Times and Associated Press from April 1, 2021, to May 1, 2022, yielded 722 results in total, out of tens of thousands of reports on Covid.
To determine what percentage of these reports focused on IP rights, we searched within the result for “patent” or “transfer” and found only 82 mentions — just 11% of Covax coverage. Most of these mentions (85%) came from just three of the outlets: the New York Times, Associated Press and CNN. NBC and ABC never touched on these issues of Pharma monopolies, and CBS only did once.
The vast majority of global vaccine equity coverage, then, failed to ask critical questions about the sharing of technology and expertise. For instance, when CNN anchor Michael Holmes (11/29/21) remarked that wealthy countries fell behind in their pledges to donate vaccine doses to developing nations, he ignored the issue of sharing technology and expertise outright, lamenting vaccine hesitancy instead.
And when NBC Nightly News (8/5/21) highlighted the “hurdles” in Covax’s distribution of vaccines in Uganda, correspondent Cynthia McFadden noted that “distribution is time-consuming and expensive,” but omitted any criticism of pharmaceutical companies and their patents.
The core problem
Nature (5/25/21): “Every country should have the right to make its own vaccines during a pandemic.”
“The core problem is that vaccine manufacturing, research and development is too heavily concentrated in a small group of high-and middle-income countries,” an editorial in Nature (5/25/21) found.
As essential as Covax has been in addressing vaccine inequity, efforts to vaccinate the world will continue to stall if pharmaceutical companies fail to collaborate with qualified manufacturers. Expanding vaccine manufacturing would reduce some of the logistical challenges that the initiative has been facing, especially with delivery and storage.
Without pressure from national governments and the public, pharmaceutical companies will remain reluctant to allocate resources to boost manufacturing capacity worldwide—and without news coverage shedding light on the core problem, that pressure is unlikely to materialize.
The post Vaccine Equity Coverage Underplays Barrier of Patents appeared first on FAIR.
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by James Baratta.
James Baratta | Radio Free (2022-06-03T20:20:04+00:00) Vaccine Equity Coverage Underplays Barrier of Patents. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2022/06/03/vaccine-equity-coverage-underplays-barrier-of-patents/
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