Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP
Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, speaks at a press conference after the closing of the 12th Ministerial Conference in Geneva, June 17, 2022.
At its ministerial meetings this week, the World Trade Organization again demonstrated that it is an agency captured by big business, and that the U.S. should have as little to do with it as possible. After more than two years of stalling, the WTO bureaucracy and the European Union, acting at the behest of the pharmaceutical industry, blocked an effort to waive intellectual-property rules to promote wide distribution of COVID vaccines, tests, and treatments. The U.S. behaved like a helpless bystander.
The official text, pushed through by the WTO’s director-general over the objections of more than 100 member nations and at least 250 global public-health and civil society groups, reinforces existing property rights and fails utterly to promote vaccinations in poor countries. Ministers from several key nations of the Global South that had been pushing for the emergency waiver, notably South Africa and India, did not even get to see text issued in the name of the whole WTO.
If anything was worse than this travesty of public-health policy and democratic process, it was the official U.S. response. After the document was issued, the U.S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, put out a fatuous and misleading statement ducking the specific flaws in the text and claiming, “Through difficult and protracted discussions, Members were able to bridge differences and achieve a concrete and meaningful outcome to get more safe and effective vaccines to those who need it most.”
She referenced President Biden’s support for an emergency vaccine waiver, first articulated in May 2021, and implied that this deal carries it out. It does not.
I’ve been a big fan of Katherine Tai. She has stood up to pressure, from inside the administration and outside, to weaken the China tariffs. The kindest thing one can assume is that Tai can only fight so many battles and was told by higher-ups to accept the WTO deal.
Even more disingenuous was Tai’s claim that “Consultations with our stakeholders in the private sector and civil society, with Members of Congress and their staffs, and colleagues across the Administration, were critical in informing USTR’s understanding of the nuances in the global market, production challenges, and the public health needs of the world’s people.”
In fact, according to my reporting, Tai’s staff spent several days trying to get any public-interest group to say something kind about the WTO text. All refused.
(After this was published, USTR spokesperson Adam Hodge denied that agency staff did any outreach or asked groups to support the text. However, we have confirmed that USTR reached out to numerous groups, including Public Citizen, Oxfam, Catholic Cares Coalition, Health GAP, Doctors Without Borders/MSF, Partners In Health, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Knowledge Ecology International. None supported the text. We stand by our story.)
What now? The major U.S. groups, such as Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, Rethink Trade, and the Trade Justice Education Fund, want the U.S. to bypass the WTO as much as possible and to take no actions that would punish nations of the Global South that take steps to produce the vaccines, tests, and treatments they need without further enriching giant drug companies. That seems the least Biden should do.
