Case For Waiver In Pandemic

Context: Covid vaccine-related innovation will have a limited impact if its products don’t reach the bulk of the world’s population. Waiving patents is necessary and urgent for the greater global good.

Case Study: In 2000-2001, in a face-off with pharma giants, under whose patent grip 12 million HIV patients had lost lives in Africa, the Indian pharma corporation, Cipla, successfully got a patent waiver to allow supplies of anti-HIV AIDS drugs to Africa at under one dollar a day.

Challenges in patent waivers:

• Restricted innovation: Patents incentivise innovation by securing monopoly profits of multinational, multi-billion pharma companies and by making it illegal for competitors to produce cheaper and more affordable generic versions.
  • WTO makes an exception to its own pronounced ethic of “free trade” to forestall free competition and sanction profits at monopoly levels.
  • For e.g. Germany, opposing the waivers, argues that economic interests are means to a greater end — more research, greater and better disease control.

Argument in favour of  patent waivers:

• To uphold the right to a healthy life: The right to a healthy life is a moral minimum, and to find a rational basis to deny it is deeply offensive to the idea of life itself.
• To upheld India’s image as ‘the pharmacy of the world’: India has lived up to its reputation of being the “pharmacy of the world”, supplying affordable and generic drugs to poor nations.
  • Nearly 70% of medicines produced in India are exported to developing countries;
  • 75-80% of all medicines distributed by the International Dispensary Association (IDA) to developing countries are manufactured here.
  • India ranks second on the list of countries from which UNICEF purchases medical supplies.
  • Globally, 70% of the treatment for patients in more than 80 developing countries has come from Indian suppliers.
  • The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS (PEPFAR) also purchases ARVs from India for distribution in developing countries, resulting in cost savings of up to 90%.
• Rising demand for vaccines: Before the pandemic, the demand for vaccines was around 5.5 billion doses a year; it has now gone up to three times that figure.
• Positive trigger effects:
  • Removes barrier to access: As Lancet reports, “manufacturers of monoclonal antibody therapeutics that are under patent protection, have locked up most of their capacity in bilateral deals”.
    • Relaxing Article 31 of the TRIPS law would enable developing countries with insufficient or no manufacturing capacity to freely import pharmaceutical products.
    • It will allow for easier technology transfers, less stringent licensing terms and increased access of vaccine manufacturers across the world to raw materials needed.
  • Immunity from claims of illegality: It would make processes and products adopted by countries to vaccinate their populations immune from claims of illegality under the IP law.

Conclusion:

• It is the legal normal that sanctions the full force of intellectual property to routinely trump the soft and utterly malleable human right to health.
• As a moral claim, the right to health far outweighs a claim for rewards for innovation and returns on investment.