The AIDS Fight Offers A COVID Vaccine Patent

Context: Analysing different strategies in realising mass vaccination as the way out of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Analysing the various strategies for achieving mass vaccination

• Temporarily suspending patent rights: As pursued by India and South Africa through World Trade Organization (WTO), now even supported by the US.
  • Inefficacy of voluntary licensing (so far, no patent holders have joined these efforts) and patent pooling options has forced this legal discourse.
• Compulsory licensing: It overrides patent rights to allow local production or import of drugs by generic manufacturers during a public health crisis.
  • The provision is enshrined in the Doha Declaration addendum to WTO’s TRIPS agreement;
  • The Doha addendum, Section 5c, o?ers AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis as examples of what quali?es as a health emergency, opening up way for Covid vaccines too, but has been ignored.
• COVAX facility: Established to purchase vaccine doses and donate them to low-income countries, does not involve modifying patent rights. However, this option is marred with issues -
  • Underfunding: Similar ventures during the AIDS crisis were chronically underfunded and had only minor effects compared to voluntary licensing and mass production of antiretroviral drugs.
  • Inordinate delays: It is warned that people in the lowest-income countries might have to wait until 2022 to get vaccinated through this programme.
• Voluntarily licensing of patented vaccine products: A patent holder voluntarily decides to license a product to other producers who are experienced at mass-producing low-cost medications.
  • This has been a proven strategy in ensuring accessibility of HIV/AIDS medication in low-income countries and has helped in bringing down the prices of essential drugs.
  • E.g. Drug Gilead, the first-line treatment for HIV/AIDS, has come down in price from $200-$500 per person per year to $39 per person per year in low-income countries, and now 13 India-based pharmaceutical companies are producing it.
  • The United Nations’ Medicines Patent Pool and the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool are some tools available to facilitate voluntary licensing.
  • Advantages:
    • Voluntary licences enable production to begin more expeditiously as they usually are accompanied by “technology transfer”.
    • Manufacturers in India prefer to work with voluntary licences because there is more goodwill between companies, while compulsory licences often come with a legal battle.

Way Forward:

• Identifying the obligations of manufacturers:
  • The billions of dollars in government aid given to companies to help develop CO­ VID­19 treatments should entail an obligation to enable the mass production of vaccines.
  • Patents are not ironclad ownership rights but temporary contracts that balance public interest with claims of the innovator.
  • It is not just a question of social justice but to prevent deadlier, more contagious and possibly vaccine-resistant variants.