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On Covid patents waiver, health cannot be held hostage to profit -Rajshree Chandra

-The Indian Express

Innovation in vaccine production can have an impact only if it is accessible to all.

Patents and access to life-saving drugs has always been an emotive and contentious issue. The right to healthy life is a moral minimum, and to find a rational basis to deny it is deeply offensive to the idea of life itself. At the same time, pharma corporations and institutions claim patents are a just recompense for their investments, overriding concerns over equitable and wider access to life-saving drugs. Patent claims over vaccines and access to them is a case in point.

Last week, in an ethically conscious move, the US government declared support for a patent waiver on Covid-19 vaccines. The terms, duration and modalities of the waiver are yet to be worked out and the devil — or the messiah — could well be in the detail. More importantly, the waiver is yet to get the WTO’s approval, and opposition to the Biden plan from European countries threatens to deadlock talks on such a waiver. Germany, for instance, has said that a patent waiver sets a bad precedent and may inhibit private research and innovation.

In democratic forums of the world, we can elevate health as a human right, or a constitutional right, but the truth of the matter is that this right is hostage to patent rights of innovators. The patent holder and its gatekeepers would say, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked in response to the US proposal: “The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so in the future.” Pharmaceutical companies reacted with anger to the US decision, and shares of Chinese and American vaccine manufacturers tumbled.

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. The moral justification has always been that patents protect not so much the economic interests of the pharma companies but that these economic interests are means to a greater end — more research, greater and better disease control. However, if drug discovery indeed is a means to a greater end, one may well ask: What good is an innovation if it does not serve the bulk of the world’s people?

A useful reminder from two decades back helps put the issue in perspective. 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 appealed to the world for a patent waiver to allow supplies of anti-HIV AIDS drugs to Africa at under one dollar a day. A brilliant documentary, Fire in the Blood, captures the utter destruction of disease and the heroic efforts of Yusuf Hamied, chairman of Cipla, to make generic antiretroviral (ARV) drugs available and accessible to dying millions of Africa.

From then on, India has lived up to its reputation of being the “pharmacy of the world”, supplying affordable and generic drugs to poor nations. Nearly 70 per cent of medicines produced in India are exported to developing countries; 75-80 per cent 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. Eighty per cent of ARVs used by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are purchased in India and are distributed in treatment projects in over 30 countries. Globally, 70 per cent 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 per cent.

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