Waive intellectual property rights for the Covid-19 vaccine, the people paid for it anyway

If pharmaceutical companies continue to put their profits over people, millions more will die.

Sourced: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic

Governments around the world are panicking as the new Omicron variant spreads like wildfire. While it seems like this variant does not not cause severe cases, we know that the efficacy of available vaccines diminishes with every new variant. According to John Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center, there are at least 37 nations where less than 10% of the population is fully vaccinated. Unlike the unvaccinated population in wealthy nations like the US and the UK, this is not the result of vaccine hesitancy. 

On October 2, 2020 South Africa and India called on the World Trade Organization to issue a temporary intellectual property waiver on Covid-19 vaccines and therapies. This waiver would allow vaccines to be distributed and produced faster and in larger quantities. It would also mean that low-income countries could actually afford to buy them, without having to wait until years after high-income countries out-bid them. 

Over a year later this waiver has still not been granted. This is because a small number of countries (including the US, UK, European Union, Israel, and Switzerland) have opposed or stalled the proposal. 

In the meantime, millions more people have died and dozens of new variants have appeared. This is exactly what was predicted months ago. A survey of 77 epidemiologists from 28 countries found that 88% of them believed that “persistent low vaccine coverage in many countries would make it more likely for vaccine resistant mutations to appear”. A similarly notable 77% of them said that “open sharing of technology and intellectual property could increase global vaccine coverage”.

The most common argument against waiving intellectual property rights is that the corporations that ‘created’ them spent billions of dollars and took a massive risk. This is far from the truth. Disregarding the fact that they have already made massive profits from selling to high income countries, most of the actual work put into researching the vaccines was funded by the public. 

Let’s take the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as an example. Between 97.1% and 99% of the funding for all of the research that led to its creation came from public sources. A large part from the US’s National Institute for Health (NIH) and from the UK Government. AstraZeneca pledged to sell their vaccines at-cost during the pandemic. Last month, they went back on this pledge and transitioned to “modest profitability”.

The Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines are both based on an mRNA approach. mRNA technology is the result of two discoveries made by publicly funded research at the University of Pennsylvania and the NIH. The German government also subsidised BioNtech to the tune of $445 million to create its vaccine. Then, the US guaranteed a $2 billion purchase from Pfizer allowing them to speed up the creation of the vaccine and receive a guaranteed profit. 

A common theme exists here. Governments fund the research that vaccines are based on, and then allow private corporations to charge them extortionate rates to buy said vaccines. Analysis from Imperial College London engineers and Public Citizen estimates that it would cost $1.18 to produce each dose of the Pfizer-BioNtech vaccine and $2.85 to produce each dose of the Moderna vaccine. These companies have sold their vaccines at up to 24 times the estimated cost of production. 

Wealthy countries are wrong to think that because they can afford to buy vaccines then distribution is not their problem. While the available Covid-19 vaccines have been overwhelmingly effective, this will cease to be true if global herd immunity is not reached. Such a large number of unvaccinated people in countries with little to no public health infrastructure will result in more variants, that will in turn set vaccinated countries back to square one.

If high-income nations put global public health above corporate interests and support the waiving of intellectual property rights this pandemic will end much sooner.

Pi Opinion content does not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial team, Pi Media society, Students’ Union UCL or University College London. We aim to publish opinions from across the student body — if you read anything you would like to respond to, get in touch via email.