[CTC] Large majority of US voters support patent waiver on Covid-19 vaccines

Thu Apr 15 05:10:33 PDT 2021

Three great articles below, highlighting that Americans support the TRIPS waiver by a more than 2-to-1 margin.  Social media toolkit online here. <https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1TOwXasciTHWNFEa1mc6Gpeo6LmrkmoA2>

https://newrepublic.com/article/162049/let-countries-copy-covid-vaccines <https://newrepublic.com/article/162049/let-countries-copy-covid-vaccines> 

Kate Aronoff <https://newrepublic.com/authors/kate-aronoff>/April 15, 2021
Let Other Countries Copy the Covid Vaccines
Americans want to free the vaccine patents. Will the Biden administration listen?

There’s one big thing the Biden administration could do to beat back the global pandemic: urge the World Trade Organization (WTO) to waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines. To date, it hasn’t done that, despite calls from India, South Africa and 100 other mainly low- and middle-income countries represented in the WTO. Instead, protections for patent-holders in the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement prevent such countries from manufacturing the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer, among others, and which are now being administered to the populations of wealthier nations.

Polling released Thursday morning, however—conducted by Data for Progress on behalf of the Progressive International, which brings together left-leaning movements and thinkers from around the world—finds that a majority of people in the U.S. support waiving patent protections on the vaccines. As WTO signatory nations prepare to gather and discuss such demands on May 5, the administration will now have to decide whether it stands with its constituents and lower-income countries worldwide, or with pharmaceutical companies.

Sixty percent of likely voters want President Biden to support calls for a TRIPS suspension from low- and middle- income countries at the WTO, according to the new poll, including 72 percent of registered Democrats and 50 percent of registered Republicans. Thirty-six percent of Republicans polled disagree, compared with just 28 percent of likely voters overall. 

Nearly forty percent of vaccines administered so far have been distributed in 27 wealthy nations that represent just 11 percent of the world’s population. Many poor and middle-income countries may not have the required vaccination rates for herd immunity until 2024. Just 1 percent of Africans have been vaccinated, compared with 36 percent of North Americans and 22 percent of Europeans. The WHO has endorsedlifting patent protections, as well, in line with calls for a free and universally accessible “People’s Vaccine” that reflects the ample public-sector fundings that has created the vaccines. Nearly one hundred members of the U.S. House of Representatives have reportedly signed on to a letter urging the administration to support a waiver, joined by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in the Senate.

“This virus does not respect borders,” Sanders said in an emailed press statement. “The bottom line is, the faster we help vaccinate the global population, the safer we will all be. That should be our number one priority, not maximizing the profits of pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders.”

In advance of the WTO General Council meeting next month, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai has been meeting with both drugmakers and waiver advocates. While she reportedly committed to “increasing the production and distribution of vaccines,” she hasn’t signaled any clear intention as of yet that the U.S. will change its position on patents in the WTO. In addition to members of Congress, 175 former, hardly left-wing world leaders and Nobel laureates are urging the White House to do just that, calling a WTO waiver “a vital and necessary step to bringing an end to this pandemic. It must be combined with ensuring vaccine knowhow and technology is shared openly.” Officially, the office of the USTR is still “evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.”

There are some signals the administration may be warming to the idea. In remarks to a virtual conference on vaccine equity Wednesday, Tai acknowledged that “there are many aspects of the institution of the WTO and its rules that have not adapted to a changed world... We hope to hear more today about how the market once again has failed in meeting the health needs of developing countries.” 

As Alexander Zaitchik detailed for The New Republic this month, billionaire Bill Gates has been instrumental in the push to place patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines, acting against efforts by the WHO to get companies and governments to pool intellectual property related to novel coronavirus vaccines and treatments to speed global pandemic response. Gates’s patent-friendly alternative has failed to meet even its modest goal for access, which was defined as vaccinating just one-fifth of populations in participating low- and middle-income countries. The track record for private property rights enabling a speedy response to diseases is dismal. As Zaitchek notes, public pressure in the 1990s eventually forced the Clinton administration to drop its high-profile campaign in support of a lawsuit from pharmaceutical companies looking to block Global South countries—then gripped by a horrific HIV/AIDS epidemic—from producing cheap, generic antiretroviral drugs that were by that point widespread in the U.S. 

Though companies can now produce generic versions of vaccines under compulsory licensing agreements, developing countries have been reticent to do so—including during this pandemic—for fear of diplomatic blowback. “Historically, the U.S. has always threatened countries that have used it,” Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz told the Financial Times. “So we’ve agreed to it, but we undermine it.”

As is worth reiterating, the case for lifting patent protections in the Covid crisis is particularly strong. As long as large populations remain unvaccinated the virus will keep evolving, raising the likelihood that variants will emerge against which current vaccines are less effective. Aside from being the right thing to do, vaccinating everyone as quickly as possible is in everyone’s best interest.

There’s a startlingly close parallel when it comes to the climate crisis, as well. Countries vulnerable to climate change have long seen intellectual property as a key barrier to scaling up clean energy in low- and middle-income countries. Allowing companies to hoard patents—and charge extortionate rents for the right to produce life-saving green technology—stands to slow down a global energy transition, and potentially empower a new class of patent holders to dole out green energy only to those that can afford it. Emissions, meanwhile, will keep rising.  

Whether on vaccines or batteries for electric cars, rules designed to protect the profits of the few tend to come at the expense of the many.

https://theintercept.com/2021/04/15/covid-vaccine-patent-ip-poll/ <https://theintercept.com/2021/04/15/covid-vaccine-patent-ip-poll/>

There Shouldn’t Be Vaccine Patents in a Health Crisis. Most Americans Agree: Waive Them.
A new poll found most Americans want Biden to break drug companies’ monopolies and end Covid-19 vaccine apartheid.

Natasha Lennard <https://theintercept.com/staff/natasha-lennard/>April 15 2021, 5:00 a.m.

THE EXTREMITY OF Covid-19 vaccine apartheid <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/14/rich-countries-surplus-covid-vaccines> cannot be overstated. As of mid-February, the United States had acquired enough vaccines for three times its total population, while in 130 countries, not a single vaccine shot had been administered. This is no accident, but the direct and long-predicted result of a vaccine production and access model tied to privatized intellectual property and entrenched medicine monopolies.

The majority of Americans want President Joe Biden to act to end this intolerable vaccine inequality. Sixty percent of U.S. voters said they wanted Biden to endorse a motion <https://msfaccess.org/msf-wealthy-countries-dont-block-and-ruin-potential-landmark-waiver-monopolies-during-pandemic> at the World Trade Organization that would waive patent barriers and other crucial intellectual property protections on Covid-19 vaccines, according to a new poll <https://www.filesforprogress.org/datasets/2021/3/dfp-covid-us-vaccine-waiver-toplines.pdf> from Data for Progress and the Progressive International. This would enable a significant expansion of global production and rollout, while disrupting the extraordinary profiteering <https://theintercept.com/2021/03/18/covid-vaccine-price-pfizer-moderna/> of pharmaceutical leviathans in a death-dealing pandemic.

The refusal on the part of major pharmaceutical companies and Western powers to ensure the sharing of vaccine patent and production information has been an immeasurable moral failure, not to mention a most foolish approach to a pandemic in need of a global response. The new poll also makes clear that, for Biden, blocking vaccine sharing is not even a popular position. Seventy-two percent of registered Democrats want the president to remove patent barriers to speed vaccine rollout and reduce costs for less affluent nations.

At present, WTO rules over intellectual property mean that most countries are barred from producing the leading vaccines that have been approved, including those by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, which are U.S.-produced. Last October, South Africa and India brought a proposal <https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-wto/rich-developing-nations-wrangle-over-covid-vaccine-patents-idUSKBN2B21V9> to the WTO for a temporary waiver that would apply to certain intellectual property on Covid-19 medical tools and technologies until global herd immunity is reached.

It garnered majority support from member states: A hundred countries support the proposal overall, and 58 governments now co-sponsor it; 375 civil society organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam, and Amnesty International have signed a letter in support.

The waiver was blocked, however, by a small number of wealthy nations and blocs, including the U.S., the U.K., and the EU, that chose instead to leave vaccine production in the hands of only a few pharmaceutical companies, which, through public-private partnerships, have ensured priority access to the rich countries in turn.

There are no legitimate grounds for maintaining patent barriers in this health crisis unless you’re a pharmaceutical giant making billions <https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/06/from-pfizer-to-moderna-whos-making-billions-from-covid-vaccines> or, of course, a Western power invested in maintaining global power through neoliberalization, market monopolies, and racialized capitalism. The strongest advocates of intellectual property protections in medicine, Bill Gates chief among them <https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines>, have offered no ethical basis for the current status quo beyond vague gestures to protecting “innovation.”

Even a self-interested approach, that sees the devastating economic possibilities of a mutating virus turning the pandemic into something endemic, should make the necessity of a patent waiver clear. The commitment to monopoly medicine is, in this sense, ideological.

THE WTO WAIVER proposal needs backing by a consensus of the the organization’s 164 members to pass. It was under President Donald Trump that the U.S. blocked the patent waiver: a move that came as no surprise for an administration of white nationalists, which proudly left <https://apnews.com/article/9dc4077f95d183649ca24a32a18abf01> the World Health Organization. A change of tack by the Biden administration, which rejoined the WHO on Day One, could go a long way in pushing other wealthy countries to follow suit.

The Data for Progress and the Progressive International poll makes clear that Biden has a popular mandate in acting against vaccine apartheid. Burcu Kilic, research director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen and member of Progressive International’s Council, called on Biden to “listen to Americans who put him in power” and “do the right thing.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded to the poll saying the U.S. should be “leading the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Sanders, “a temporary WTO waiver, which would enable the transfer of vaccine technologies to poorer countries, is a good way to do that.” More than 60 lawmakers have added their signature to a letter pushing Biden to save lives through a global vaccination drive.

For an entire year, public health organizations and civil society groups have en masse urged <https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2020/may/20200514_covid19-vaccine-open-letter> an internationalized pandemic response of open-sourced research and medical tools. Such calls for cooperation and equity were swiftly quashed, in no small part thanks to the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. As Alexander Zaitchik noted in a crucial piece <https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines> for The New Republic, Gates’s long history of intellectual property crusading enacted a Covid-19 vaccine response in line with a status quo “defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.”

I’m not the first to highlight the colonialist <https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/04/oxford-astrazeneca-COVID-19-deal-reinforces-vaccine-sovereignty/> regime that has shaped this unequal vaccine scenario. Sharon Lerner reported <https://theintercept.com/2020/12/31/covid-vaccine-countries-scarcity-access/> for The Intercept that countries including Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, and Turkey, which hosted Pfizer vaccine trials, have been shut out of sufficient vaccine access. The same extractive practices that have historically enriched Western powers through the direct expense and suffering of colonized peoples continue to this day with most deadly consequences — vaccine apartheid among them.

Whether Biden, no enemy to neoliberalism, will take a stand against the approach of canonized philanthropist Gates is not yet clear. It’s now undeniable that that U.S. voters, alongside the broad public health community, want him to.

https://progressive.international/wire/2021-04-15-large-majority-of-us-voters-support-patent-waiver-on-covid-19-vaccines/en <https://progressive.international/wire/2021-04-15-large-majority-of-us-voters-support-patent-waiver-on-covid-19-vaccines/en> 

Large majority of US voters support patent waiver on Covid-19 vaccines
Shock poll reveals majority support for Joe Biden to suspend TRIPS and support global vaccination.
Senator Bernie Sanders & Representative Ilhan Omar respond to a shock poll showing that a large majority of US voters want Biden to temporarily waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines.
A new poll finds that 60% of US voters want President Joe Biden to endorse the motion by more than 100 lower- and middle-income countries to temporarily waive patent protections on Covid-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization. Only 28% disagreed.

The survey, carried out by Data for Progress and the Progressive International, shows a super majority of 72% registered Democrats want Biden to temporarily waive patent barriers to speed vaccine roll out and reduce costs for developing nations. Even registered Republicans support the action by margin of 50% in favor to 36% opposed.

The new polling shows that “there is a popular mandate from the US American people to put human life and economic recovery ahead of corporate profits and a broken intellectual property system,” said David Adler, the general coordinator of the Progressive International. Burcu Kilic, research director of the access to medicines program at Public Citizen and member of Progressive International’s Council, called on Biden to “listen to Americans who put him in power” and “do the right thing.”

 <https://progressive.international/static/d22a39018a838b609766930b8a15f81a/e752c/03.jpg>
Due to WTO intellectual property rules, countries are barred from producing the current leading approved vaccines, including US-produced Moderna, Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson. In October of 2020, South Africa and India presented the WTO with a proposal to temporarily waive these rules for the duration of the pandemic so that vaccines can be manufactured across different countries, increasing their availability, reducing their cost and ensuring that they are delivered to everyone on earth as quickly as possible.

In the absence of the waiver, the current manufacturing and distribution rates are unlikely to stem the pandemic’s momentum, especially as new variants, which are more infectious and seem to evade the acquired immunity from prior infection or from the current vaccines, continue to emerge. The US under President Trump joined other richer nations to block them.

The shock poll reveals a level of public support for intellectual property waivers that will likely add to growing congressional pressure on Biden to join those pushing to save lives through a global vaccination drive. Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky is working on a letter to the president to which Schakowsky says more than 60 lawmakers have added their signature, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Senator Bernie Sanders, Chair of the Senate Budget Committee, responded to the poll saying the US should be “leading the global effort to end the coronavirus pandemic.” According to Sanders, “a temporary WTO waiver, which would enable the transfer of vaccine technologies to poorer countries, is a good way to do that.”

Responding to the new poll, Representative Ilhan Omar called on Biden to “support a waiver to boost the production of vaccines, treatment and tests worldwide,” arguing that it was “not just an issue of basic morality, but of public health.”

Adler argues, “US Americans know rigged rules to prop up big pharma’s profits are not in their interest. The longer the virus has to spread, the more it can mutate and become vaccine-resistant. Covid-19 anywhere is a threat to public health and economic wellbeing everywhere. If intellectual property restrictions are not lifted, the pandemic will go on for longer, killing more people and damaging more livelihoods.”

The threat to the Global South from vaccine apartheid is a “death sentence for millions around the world—and it is because giant pharmaceutical corporations would rather maximize profit than provide vaccines to people who need it,” according to Omar.

Sanders agrees, saying “the bottom line is, the faster we help vaccinate the global population, the safer we will all be. That should be our number one priority, not maximizing the profits of pharmaceutical companies and their shareholders.”

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.citizenstrade.org/pipermail/ctcfield-citizenstrade.org/attachments/20210415/03e341e9/attachment.html>