Sharing vaccine rights a recipe for disaster: Pharma giants
Australia’s leading pharmaceutical lobby group argues it would undermine the scaling-up of vaccines by creating a ‘greater demand for already scarce ingredients in the supply chain’.
Australia’s leading pharmaceutical lobby group has pushed back against plans to share recipes of Covid-19 vaccines, arguing that it would undermine the scaling-up of vaccines by creating a “greater demand for already scarce ingredients in the supply chain”.
Medicines Australia, representing pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Bayer and Merck, says waiving the intellectual property of proven vaccines would not deliver the “know-how, ingredients and workforce” to manufacture jabs.
Writing in The Australian, Medicines Australia chief executive Elizabeth de Somer says sharing vaccine IP would fail to address “the trade restrictions, regulatory inadequacies or healthcare system deficiencies that are currently posing real barriers to vaccine equity”.
A group of nations led by India and South Africa has lobbied for a temporary IP waiver of Covid-19 vaccines under the Agreement on Trade-Related aspects of IP Rights (TRIPS), which has received support from the US and Australia.
Ahead of an imminent TRIPS showdown at the World Trade Organisation, where the EU, Britain, Canada and Japan are expected to oppose the proposal, Ms de Somer says vaccine IP is “not a barrier to vaccine access”.
“If anything, noise around a waiver is a distraction from the key issues. We must reduce the toll of the pandemic on lives and livelihoods, which will require global equitable access to vaccines and country readiness for vaccination,” she says. “The TRIPS waiver could disrupt the global supply chains of the raw materials which are crucial to develop the quantities required by the world.
“For example, the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid-19 vaccine contains 280 different ingredients sourced from 86 suppliers in 19 different countries.” The intervention by Medicines Australia comes after recent comments by Trade Minister Dan Tehan that the government “would support the TRIPS waiver”. “These negotiations are complex. That’s why you have countries where we have different decisions when it comes to what sort of waiver should be put in place and that’s what we’re working through very constructively at the WTO,” Mr Tehan said.
Ms de Somer says the speed of producing vaccines is not being limited by the number of manufacturing plants but by the “scarcity of raw materials for the vaccines and export restrictions of the finished products”.
“There are several issues which need to be addressed by governments if we are ever going to achieve a vaccinated world,” she says. “To advance vaccine equity, we need to urgently eliminate trade barriers, optimise vaccine production, support countries’ readiness to vaccine their populations, drive further innovation and create a greater willingness to share more doses with developing countries.
“By January 2022, there will be sufficient vaccines produced for every adult on every continent.”
Ms de Somer describes the TRIPS waiver as an “empty promise that governments have used as a distraction from tackling the real issues to save lives”.
As of last week, Pfizer had delivered two billion Covid-19 vaccines to 157 countries and territories with more than 707 million doses provided to 91 low- and middle-income countries. Pfizer expects to produce three billion doses this year, of which one billion have been reserved for middle and lower-income countries.
AstraZeneca, which has an agreement with Serum Institute India to supply one billion doses for low and middle-income countries, has provided more than two-thirds of vaccines under the COVAX facility.