In two weeks, the World Trade Organisation’s 164-member nations –from Nigeria to Nicaragua and Angola to Argentina– will vote on an unprecedented petition to waive intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines. The waiver, originally requested in October 2020 by India and South Africa, has become a top priority for the WTO Director General, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the former Nigerian Minister of Finance. She views it as central to her legacy.
And it certainly will be historic — but not for the reasons Okonjo-Iweala thinks. Waiving intellectual property rights on vaccines will undermine the WTO’s mission, hinder scientific innovation, and worsen the severity of the inevitable next global health emergency. The petition itself is based on a false claim — the claim that strong IP protections have blocked many developing nations from obtaining enough vaccine doses, and that dismantling those protections will get more shots in vulnerable patients’ arms. That is demonstrably inaccurate.
Thanks in large part to strong IP protections, the global biotech industry was able to invent, test, and secure regulatory approval for multiple vaccines less than a year after COVID-19 first emerged — an unprecedented achievement. Prior to COVID-19, the fastest-developed vaccine in history took four years to create, test, and approve. If we had merely matched the previous record, the world would still be in full-blown crisis.
Confidence in IP protections then inspired vaccine developers to ink hundreds of voluntary licensing agreements with other firms to rapidly scale production. In 2021, companies churned out over 11 billion doses of the COVID-19 shots — more than double the world’s total production of all types of vaccines prior to the pandemic. These firms have the capacity to manufacture 20 billion more shots this year.
In fact, as the companies’ manufacturing efforts have proved so successful, the world now enjoys a surplus of vaccines. The Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, halted production of COVID-19 vaccines in December because it had hundreds of millions of doses in storage — with few prospective buyers.
Africa’s first and only COVID-19 vaccine plant may soon close due to lack of orders, and the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention asked the world to slow and stagger future vaccine donations because the continent already has more doses than it can distribute. Officials at COVAX — an initiative administered by the World Health Organisation and GAVI — and the Gates Foundation both say vaccine stocks are exceeding demand and the real problems are absorption, infrastructure, and patient hesitancy. Yet, despite the fact that there is no shortage of vaccines — the supposed reason for the waiver — Okonjo-Iweala is pressing ahead. The question is why?
South Africa and India’s motives are plain enough. Both are global leaders in generic drug manufacturing. To them, the waiver is a lottery ticket. The mRNA platforms that underlie the vaccines could be used to treat everything from cancer to HIV. The technology is worth tens, or even hundreds, of billions of dollars. If the waiver is approved, South Africa’s and India’s generic pharmaceutical industries would get that technology almost immediately at no cost. But the cost to the WTO’s reputation — and to patients around the world — will be incalculable.
In the modern economy, the most valuable assets are not physical factories or raw materials – they are ideas: the formula and know-how necessary to create cutting-edge medicines; or the software code behind popular apps; or the lyrics and music behind chart-topping songs.
These ideas are hard to invent, but easy to copy. Inventors would have no incentive to spend years and billions of dollars toiling away to come up with something new if rivals could simply steal the creations. The IP protections, like patents, copyrights, and exclusivity periods, ensure that inventors can own their ideas for a limited time, and reap the fruits of their own labour.
That’s precisely why the WTO approved the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property in the mid-1990s. TRIPS was expressly designed to set strong global standards for IP protection, and thus spark a virtuous cycle of investment and innovation. And it worked! Global GDP soared from $42 trillion in 1995, when TRIPS first took effect, to more than $87 trillion by 2019 — and that’s after adjusting for inflation. Stronger IP protections, especially in the developing world, deserve some of the credit.
So, it is a mystery why Director General Okonjo-Iweala, who is by all accounts a bright, honest, and accomplished public servant, would want to undercut one of the WTO’s most successful accomplishments, especially since it is abundantly clear that vaccine supplies are more than adequate. Alarmingly, she seems so committed to this misguided course of action that she ignored the WTO’s norms and helped negotiate the text of the waiver herself, behind closed doors, with just four WTO members. And she is forcing a vote mere weeks after she publicly unveiled the text. The WTO directors-general are supposed to be even-handed administrators, not ideologues pushing partisan causes.
One must assume that ambition is motivating Okonjo-Iweala. Perhaps, she has her eyes set on New York – and thinks that a “victory” at the WTO will put her in the conversation to be the next Secretary-General at the United Nations. Whatever the ambition may be, it should not be at the expense of undermining innovation and next global health challenges. Intellectual property protections, and the WTO’s previously strong defence of these safeguards, are why we have new technologies to trade in the first place. IP protections promote international trade, economic growth, and their attendant social benefits.
The waiver would undermine all of them and does so without increasing the global supply or distribution of Covid vaccines by a single dose. Worst of all, the shockwave it would send through the global economy would leave the world — especially developing nations like Nigeria — less prepared to combat the next pandemic when it inevitably strikes our increasingly interconnected planet.
New pharmaceuticals each cost more than $2 billion to research, develop, and bring to market. If companies cannot rely on global enforcement of their patents to ensure returns on those investments, they are going to stop investing. It is no different for microchips, green tech to fight climate change, and even popular entertainment. Okonjo-Iweala owes the world a candid explanation for this reckless gambit. And if she does not change course, she may end up owing future generations even more: an apology.
Ayodele, a Senior Research Fellow with the Initiative for Public Policy Analysis, a public policy think-tank based in Lagos, wrote in via [email protected]
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