Lori Wallach
Rethinking Trade – Season 1 Episode 30: Deep Dive:
The mission here is to get vaccines, treatments and tests to people in every country in the world. Because no one is going to be safe, the economy’s not going to get back in its feet anywhere unless people are able to fight COVID everywhere. Right now there is the capacity to make about 4 billion doses of vaccine per year; 15 billion doses are needed. Governments have spent tens of billions of dollars giving it to pharmaceutical corporations to come up with vaccines. Yet the pharmaceutical corporations have monopoly control over aware how much, if the vaccines will be manufactured, where they can be sold, and at what price. And one part of the reason for this lunatic situation where dozens of countries have not had a single dose of vaccine. And many developing countries are not expected to have significant vaccination until 2024 is in part because of World Trade Organization rules in the trade-related aspects of intellectual property TRIPS agreement, these WTO rules require every signatory country to give very lengthy monopoly rights to corporations with respect to not just patents over say a medicine, but the copyright that goes to the computer program for the machine that makes the vaccine or that makes the ventilator work. And the design information about the machine that is used to do a key process and making the vaccine and what’s called undisclosed information protections, which has both to do with some of the know-how about what needs to be done to make it work but also has to do with certain test information. And all of those protections are what South African and India now with 100 countries supporting them are asking is temporarily waived. So that those monopolies are suspended to the extent doing so is necessary to treat and to stop
— source citizen.typepad.com | Mar 31, 2021