COVID-19
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Only 3 per cent of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated against Covid while Big Pharma runs up billions in profits. It’s time to waive patents, argues Sarah Boseley
ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN
Twenty years ago, Big Pharma’s reputation was in shreds. The drug manufacturers had pulled off an atrocious piece of PR. Just as the world was waking up to the growing death toll from Aids in Africa, the major companies took it upon themselves to launch legal action against Nelson Mandela’s government, which had been looking to buy cheaper versions of their patented medicines. As it happens, Aids drugs were then so prohibitively expensive that they were not on Mandela’s shopping list, while generic versions were not available. But that did not prevent a global outcry.
The drug giants hastily threw in the towel. But they have struggled ever since to convince the public of their serious good intent. Their story is that they spend billions of dollars researching and developing medicines and that their huge investment allows us all to live healthier, happier, longer lives. To claw back their massive financial investment, they say, they need patents that may run for 20 years on their medicines. These intellectual property rights prevent other companies from making cheap, generic versions. It guarantees Big Pharma a lengthy monopoly on sales.
Two decades on from that moment they’d like to forget in a court in Pretoria, the pharmaceutical companies want to make that same argument over vaccines against Covid-19. But the honeymoon they enjoyed when the first shots went into people’s arms and hope spread around the world is well and truly over. Only a tiny proportion of the populations of developing countries have been vaccinated, and very few doses have been supplied to them by the leading Covid vaccine companies. In the affluent nations of Europe and north America, millions are now getting booster jabs, while most Africans have had none. It is still true, in spite of the complacency of the well-jabbed nations, that none of us is safe until we’re all safe. That has just been dramatically demonstrated by the identification of the omicron variant in southern Africa, where vaccination rates are perilously low.