Amit Sharma/AP Photo
COVID-19 patients receive oxygen outside a Gurdwara, a Sikh house of worship, in New Delhi, India, May 1, 2021. Record numbers of COVID cases and deaths were recorded in India over the weekend.
On Wednesday, the World Trade Organization convenes a General Council meeting, where one pressing agenda item will be a temporary waiver of intellectual-property provisions (known as TRIPS) so that production of COVID vaccines can proceed worldwide, at the lowest possible cost.
More than 100 member nations of the WTO have requested the waiver. The World Health Organization, which reports that just 0.3 percent of worldwide vaccine doses have gone to poor countries, has pushed for the waiver. But the Biden administration is set to block it.
The issue is not just humanitarian—saving millions of lives in the global South, most dramatically in India, Brazil, and much of Africa. We also have our self-interest to consider. The more the virus persists and mutates, the greater is the risk that new, vaccine-resistant strains develop and spread worldwide, including to the U.S.
We may feel smug and secure, now that most Americans are or will soon be vaccinated. But in a pandemic, no nation is an island. Yet worldwide, COVAX, the global vaccine cooperative for more than 100 largely poor countries, has only gotten about 49 million doses so far.
The pharmaceutical industry, already one of the most grotesquely profitable, can well afford to place humanity over profits for a time. Drug companies have received over $110 billion in direct subsidies from governments to develop or distribute vaccines.
In addition, Pfizer and Moderna anticipate 2021 profits of $15 billion and $18.4 billion, respectively, from vaccine sales, as nations have engaged in a bidding war over early supply.
The drug companies are fiercely resisting the waiver, lest it set some kind of precedent as well as cost them future profits. While they have held down prices to about $19.50 a dose during the pandemic, they expect to charge far higher prices for booster shots and annual renewals. This strategy was confirmed in a transcript of an earnings call with Pfizer executives and investors.
The industry strategy seems to be to head off pressure for a waiver by promising to increase low-cost supply voluntarily. Moderna made a splash with an announcement that it will provide 500 million more doses via Covax. But that promise is a year-end figure, and vaccines are needed now.
The World Health Organization reports that just 0.3 percent of worldwide vaccine doses have gone to poor countries.
Given the appalling history of this industry, their stance is no surprise. What’s shocking is that the Biden administration seems to be doing their bidding.
In a Friday meeting of senior congressional Democrats with COVID coordinator Jeff Zients and U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, requesting that the administration support the waiver, Zients gave no ground. Instead, he hinted that some kind of announcement would be forthcoming soon about additional voluntary provision of more doses at low cost.
But price is not the only problem. The more serious problem is volume. The world needs between 10 and 15 billion vaccine doses, but so far the big producers that enjoy patent protection have produced only about 1.4 billion doses this year.
Only with the intellectual-property waiver and the mobilization of worldwide production capacity, some of it ironically in India, can the supply meet the demand and the human need.
Sources say the administration is internally divided on this one. U.S. Trade Rep Tai, as well as public-health officials and some foreign-policy officials, support the waiver. But Tai reportedly has been undercut by some of her inherited staff, who are committed to enforcing WTO rules come what may. The political team is said to be anxious about the optics of U.S.-based vaccine makers serving foreigners before the pandemic is over in the U.S.
Ironically, opposition in the WTO bureaucracy to waiving intellectual-property rules may be softening. The official WTO position has been to retain patent protection and to encourage drug makers to voluntarily accelerate production of more cheap vaccines. But sources say that WTO Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has said privately that she personally supports a waiver.
It’s the job of President Biden personally to consider the larger stakes—the fact that the U.S. would win worldwide gratitude for saving millions of lives by removing industry roadblocks to the widest and earliest and cheapest possible distribution of vaccines; as well as America’s own public-health interest in defeating a global pandemic as rapidly as possible.
If the United States should stand for anything, it should stand for people over profits in a global emergency. It’s even more appalling that so much of that profit is the fruit of public research institutions and public dollars.
Biden has been a pleasant surprise in so many areas. Joe, here’s one more.
