[CTC] WTO holding closed-door COVID vaccine meeting on Wednesday

[Arthur Stamoulis]

Takes from Politico and Third World Network below…


Politico Morning Trade

— Top trade officials from the U.S., the EU, South Africa and India are expected to participate in a closed-door WTO meeting on Wednesday to discuss what steps countries can take by the end of the year to alleviate the current shortages of Covid-19 vaccines.

KEY COUNTRIES TO PARTICIPATE IN WTO VACCINE MEETING:Top trade officials from countries on the opposite sides of the debate over whether the WTO should waive intellectual property rights protections on Covid-19 vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics are expected to participate in a closed-door discussion on Wednesday organized by WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.

A draft agenda <https://go.politicoemail.com/?qs=37a3655eb53b2b7f4a6ce3567acefe0cc7793864805dee07515bdc4b778c5c0c1ff0837a9c863808cd8e2760192dee0b> seen by the trade development group Third World Network said the invited speakers include Indian Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal and South African Trade and Industry Minister Ebrahim Patel, whose countries argue the waiver is needed for manufacturers around the world to scale up production of the life-saving medicines. 

The invited speakers also include European Union Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai. The EU and the U.S. say India and South Africa have not shown why a general waiver is needed since WTO rules already give individual members the flexibility to waive patent rules during health emergencies through a process known as compulsory licensing.

A WTO spokesperson confirmed the participation of the four ministers in Wednesday’s event and said many developing country manufacturers were also expected. But many other details of the Third World Network report are inaccurate, including that South African Ambassador Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter of South Africa was not invited to attend and give remarks, the spokesperson said.

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> 
> Third World Network Information Service
> 
> TWN Info Service on Trade, IP and Health
> 12 April 2021
> Third World Network
> www.twn.my <http://www.twn.my/> <https://wp.twnnews.net/sendpress/eyJpZCI6IjU2MTg2IiwicmVwb3J0IjoiMzA4NyIsInZpZXciOiJ0cmFja2VyIiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cDpcL1wvd3d3LnR3bi5teSJ9/ <https://wp.twnnews.net/sendpress/eyJpZCI6IjU2MTg2IiwicmVwb3J0IjoiMzA4NyIsInZpZXciOiJ0cmFja2VyIiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cDpcL1wvd3d3LnR3bi5teSJ9/>>
> WTO-TRIPS waiver: “Third Way” Set to Reinforce Status Quo?
> 
> Washington DC, 12 April (D Ravi Kanth): The World Trade Organization Director-General Ms Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is hosting a meeting with select trade ministers, large representation of Big Pharma, and a few other stakeholders on 14 April, in what appears to be an attempt to undermine the proposed TRIPS waiver, said people familiar with the development.
> 
> A revised confidential draft agenda for the half-day closed-door virtual meeting on “COVID-19 and Vaccine Equity: What can the WTO contribute” seen by this writer, suggests that the participants are stacked in favour of Big Pharma with an agenda that appears to primarily reinforce the “same way” of the past one year. The status quo involves non-transparent, industry controlled restrictive agreements that fail to leverage global manufacturing capacity, especially capacity in developing countries, and to provide a sustainable solution to access in the short term as well as for the near future given that COVID-19 is here to stay, with vaccination and revaccination likely to be a norm in the coming years.
> 
> Interestingly, the DG seems either oblivious to the fact that the WTO can only make its contribution to COVID-19 through its binding rule-making process, or by blatantly pursuing a top-down agenda to undermine the actual contribution that the WTO could make through the TRIPS waiver.
> 
> The TRIPS waiver proposed by India and South Africa in October 2020 and now also co-sponsored by 56 countries and supported by the majority of developing countries and globally, calls for a time limited waiver from certain TRIPS provisions (copyright, industrial designs, patents and undisclosed information) that can be barriers to scaling up much needed COVID-19 medical products i.e. therapeutics, diagnostics, vaccines, etc.
> 
> The requirements of the WTO-TRIPS Agreement have hindered the scaling up of production, resulting in prohibitively priced medicines that were out of the reach of most developing countries. For instance, prices only dropped with the entry of Indian generic HIV/AIDs medicines in the absence of patent protection in India which made possible global scaling up of HIV treatment.
> 
> Along the same lines, the TRIPS waiver aims to create the freedom to operate and reduce legal uncertainty for manufacturers, with the goal of expanding and diversifying production and supply of COVID-19 medical products for the prevention, containment, and treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic in view of rampant hoarding and nationalism by the most powerful countries.
> 
> Against this backdrop, Ms Okonjo-Iweala’s efforts, especially convening the 14 April closed-door meeting, seems more like a public relations blitz than a sincere effort to resolve the shortage of COVID-19 vaccines through finalizing a decision on the waiver, which is being opposed by a handful of high-income countries.
> 
> A cursory reading of the agenda and participants reveals a top-down, lopsided, and anti-rules-based objective of the meeting that Ms Okonjo-Iweala seems determined to champion in the coming days, said people familiar with the agenda.
> 
> Agenda and participants for the meeting
> 
> That the meeting is going to be moderated by the London-based Economist magazine’s journalists – Ms Natasha Loder and Ms Soumaya Keynes – is very revealing as the Economist often takes positions that seem to overly favour the interests of Big Pharma.
> 
> The opening session features Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, who has supported the TRIPS waiver (unlike Ms Okonjo-Iweala) arguing that “We haven’t seen any emergency like this in our lifetime. If we cannot use it now, then when are we going to use it?”
> 
> Strikingly the WTO DG has also picked two proponents of the waiver – Mr Piyush Goyal, Minister of Commerce and Industry of India and Mr Ebrahim Patel, Minister of Trade and Industry from South Africa – for the opening session while to represent the European Union’s opposition, Mr. Valdis Dombrovskis, the EU’s trade commissioner has been invited.
> 
> Ms Katherine Tai, the newly appointed US trade representative of the Biden Administration has also been invited. While under the Trump Administration, the US had opposed the TRIPS waiver, the Biden Administration’s position remains uncertain as more recently the US has simply said that it is examining all proposals on the table for ending the pandemic. Reportedly, many US lawmakers and the US House Speaker Ms Nancy Pelosi have urged the Biden Administration to support the waiver.
> 
> First session
> 
> The first session of the event is on “challenges for equitable vaccine distribution,” to focus on discussing existing export restrictions and trade barriers, trade and free flow of goods and skilled labour as an enabler, and WTO’s contribution to transparency and monitoring.
> 
> The session’s invited participants include representatives from Pfizer, Moderna and Astra Zeneca. Also invited is Mr. Sai Prasad representing the Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network and representatives from the World Customs Organization, the African Exim Bank, the Asian Development Bank and the International Council for Harmonisation of Technical Requirements for Pharmaceuticals for Human Use (ICH). The founding and current industry members of ICH include the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA), the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Japan Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (JPMA) and the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). These organizations have a long history of undermining WTO Members’ right to use flexibilities allowed by the WTO-TRIPS Agreement and consequently access to affordable medicines.
> 
> Given the line-up of participants, the session is unlikely to unpack the root causes of inequitable vaccine distribution such as vaccine hoarding, the complete disregard of WHO’s equitable allocation framework, and industry-controlled manufacturing agreements that artificially limit production and supply with the aim to maximise profits during and post pandemic, and the lack of transparency and accountability on the part of the industry.
> 
> To date, Pfizer and Moderna that hold the mRNA technology have yet to grant any licenses to developing country manufacturers, despite several indicating their ability to produce mRNA vaccines. Pfizer and Moderna are set to make between $15 to 30 billion in profits in 2021. Astra Zeneca has also licensed one manufacturer in India, for the supply of its vaccine to 92 countries via the COVAX Facility, which together account for half the world’s population, i.e. nearly 4 billion people. As a result, a third of all humanity is now primarily dependent upon the vaccine supplies from one company in India.
> 
> Second session
> 
> The second session is expected to zoom in on “vaccine manufacturing capacity”, with sub-topics that include existing limited vaccine manufacturing capacity, how to scale up manufacturing of vaccines for the current and future crises, and the impact on manufacturing of other vaccines and critical health goods.
> 
> For this session, invited participants include the coordinators of the COVAX facility, Mr. Seth Berkley, the chief executive officer of the GAVI (Geneva-based Global Alliance for Vaccines and influenza) and Mr. Richard Hatchett, chief executive officer of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI); and representatives of the biopharmaceutical industry holding COVID-19 vaccine technology, i.e. Johnson & Johnson, Merck Group, Novavax, BioNTech.
> 
> Also invited to be on the programme is the Serum Institute of India, which holds a manufacturing license from Astra Zeneca, Incepta from Bangladesh that has been seeking a voluntary manufacturing license, the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) and BioCubaFarma. RDIF is working to ramp up production of the Sputnik V vaccine, developed by the Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Russia while Cuba is also developing five COVID-19 vaccines, including two which have entered stage 3 clinical trials. RDIF has managed to engage manufacturers from around the world to scale up manufacturing, including most recently contract manufacturing agreements with several Indian manufacturers to produce 1.5billion doses of the Sputnik V vaccine.
> 
> Third session
> 
> The third session’s theme is “path forward” that will consider how to make future vaccine distribution more equitable, whether the TRIPS waiver can help overcome the current and future pandemic, how to support sharing of intellectual property, knowhow and data, how to continuously incentivize innovation and R&D for new variants as well as future pandemics and the role of public, private partnerships.
> 
> For this third session, the WTO DG has included participants who are supporters of the international system of intellectual property monopoly and hence strong opponents of the TRIPS waiver, including Mr Darren Tang, the new Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) that is mainly financed by revenue generated by the international patent filing system it administers, the new chair of the WTO’s TRIPS Council Ambassador Dagfinn Sorli from Norway (a government openly opposed to the TRIPS waiver); Mr Thomas Cueni , the director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical and Manufacturers and Associations (IFPMA) that is mobilising support against the TRIPS waiver.
> 
> The session is also expected to include Mr John Denton, the Secretary General of International Chamber of Commerce who has highlighted the massive economic impact of COVID-19 and Mr Charles Gore, the Executive Director of the Geneva-based Medicines Patents Pool, a voluntary licensing mechanism, whose transparent licenses usually only includes supply to low-income and lower middle-income countries.
> 
> (MPP is also usually bypassed by the pharmaceutical industry. For example, Gilead pursued a non-transparent voluntary license outside of MPP for therapeutic remdesivir, licensing only to a select few manufacturers to supply while excluding half of the global population without access to remdesivir in its voluntary license strategy when the product was considered a potential COVID-19 treatment.)
> 
> Other invitees in the session include Mr Christos Christou, International President of Medicines Sans Frontieres (MSF) (a strong supporter of the TRIPS waiver), Mr. Jamie Love, Director of US-based Knowledge Ecology International (a strong supporter of WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool / C-TAP), Mr Victor Dzau, President of the US National Academy of Sciences, and Professor Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University’s Jenner Institute and Ms Mariangela Batista Galvao Simao, WHO Assistant Director-General for Drug Access, Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals.
> 
> The absence of the former WTO TRIPS Council chair Ambassador Xolelwa Mlumbi-Peter of South Africa, who has steered the TRIPS waiver discussions, in the list of participants while including the current chair Ambassador Sorli suggests a lop-sided and skewed agenda, in favour of maintaining the status quo, said another participant, who asked not to be quoted.
> 
> Interestingly, the agenda also includes WTO members that are opposed to the waiver such as Canada, Chile and Singapore, that have already vaccinated between 10-31% of their populations. Canada is a classic example of “hoarding” driving the current situation of inequity. It has already procured 8.67 doses per inhabitant, with a possible vaccine coverage of 434%, and despite this Canada has sought to receive further doses from COVAX, with 317,000 AstraZeneca-Oxford doses arriving last week. Canada claims to not be opposed to the TRIPS waiver, and yet has consistently created hurdles in discussions on the waiver, including refusing to proceed to text-based negotiations.
> 
> Absent from the agenda is strong representation from the 58 co-sponsors of the TRIPS waiver proposal in each of the sessions, and civil society groups that have played a crucial role in highlighting the challenges and causes of inequitable access.
> 
> It is noteworthy that the event will be held a day after small group meetings on TRIPS waiver scheduled by the new chair Ambassador Sorli for 12-13 April. After five months of sustained discussions on the waiver, the chair is asking the proponents of the waiver to prove yet again how intellectual property is a barrier for ramping up global production of vaccines, and how the waiver will be implemented, suggesting an attempt to slow down the ongoing discussions on the TRIPS waiver.
> 
> “There is a meeting on COVID-19 and vaccine equity but it seems very little of it has to do with what WTO can do for vaccine equity. It’s a status quo meeting, with Pharma CEOs’ monologue on non-IP related vaccine manufacturing challenges. The WTO’s proper role is to facilitate consensus among countries on the proposed TRIPS waiver, and not to organize another vaccine manufacturing meeting for the sake of a meeting”, said Dr. Burcu Kilic, Research Director of Access to Medicines Program, from a prominent US-based civil society organization Public Citizen.
> 




Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826


Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826




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