TORONTO – Watchword, prudence. US President Joe Biden’s grand opening on the temporary provisioning of patents for Covid-19 vaccines has so far not been followed up in the international community.
In Europe last Thursday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen hinted at a timid openness about the possibility of bypassing the intellectual property of patents in the hands of pharmaceutical companies producing Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and johnson and johnson vaccines. This assumption was basically shelved in the EU at the weekend, not even because von der Leyen herself was behind.
“I think – he said – that we must be open to the discussion on the derogation from the intellectual property but it must be done at 360 degrees. Because we need vaccines now for the whole world. In the short term, the intellectual property derogation will not solve the problems, it will not bring us a single dose.”
“What is needed in the short and medium-term is the sharing of vaccines, the export of the doses that are produced and the investment in increasing production. The EU has started its vaccine sharing mechanism, for example with 650,000 doses for the Western Balkans,” he pointed out.
In short, the priorities remain the increase in the production of existing vaccines and the optimization of the distribution of doses also to developing countries, which in recent months have had serious difficulties in accessing vaccines.
Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi also reined in the possibility of patent provisions, which would have allowed generic drug companies to produce existing vaccines. “In Europe – underlined the Italian Prime Minister – we must continue to accelerate vaccinations with transparency and reliability. There is also a need to increase production in every part of Europe. The other countries, he added, must remove export blockades: the European Union exports 80% of its production to countries affected by export blockades. In this context, I welcome US President Joe Biden’s proposal.”
What about Canada? Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was rather vague on the issue. On the one hand, the Liberal leader reiterated the need to help developing countries access more doses, but on the other hand, he preferred not to make any concrete commitment to the provisional provisioning of patents.
Trudeau reiterated that Canada will work to achieve a global consensus that protects the intellectual property of companies while promoting greater efforts to make more vaccines available to countries most in difficulty due to the pandemic.
The lack of courage of world leaders on this front has provoked the Pope’s indignation.
Francis urges everyone to “a spirit of justice that mobilizes us to ensure universal access to the vaccine and the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights” and warns: “A variant of this virus is closed nationalism that prevents, for example, an internationalism of vaccines”. Francis, therefore, asks us to “abandon our individualism and promote the common good”.
For the Pontiff it is necessary to “suspend patents, intellectual property is virus variant”. A message of absolute clarity, which for the time being remains unheeded by almost all the main players in the international community.
