‘Last week’s WTO 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) in Geneva concluded with pro-corporate, anti-worker, and anti-development outcomes on all major issues of access to medicines, agriculture, digital trade, and the future of the WTO itself. …The agreements should herald a warning to all: rich country governments professing new commitments to sustainable and worker-centered trade are just as likely to push anti-development outcomes and cosmetic window-dressing when it comes to protecting Big Business profits above the public interest.
Their version of WTO “reform” will facilitate the further deterioration of multilateralism and cement-in discredited pro-corporate rules on globalization.’ — An excerpt from a June 22 Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) published article ‘The World Trade Organization after the 12th Ministerial Conference’ by Deborah James.
It has been more than two years since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the Covid pandemic, and it was back in October 2021 when India and South Africa reportedly officially asked the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to waive Covid vaccine related intellectual property rights. Yet, even after so much time has passed, the recently held WTO’s Ministerial Conference did not give a green signal for this request by the two countries.
During this time, Covid-related death toll, according to WHO’s own estimates, was close to 15 million, whereby a May 5 news release from the WHO indicated the following: ‘New estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the full death toll associated directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 pandemic (described as “excess mortality”) between 1 January 2020 and 31 December 2021 was approximately 14.9 million (range 13.3 million to 16.6 million). …Excess mortality is calculated as the difference between the number of deaths that have occurred and the number that would be expected in the absence of the pandemic based on data from earlier years.
Excess mortality includes deaths associated with Covid-19 directly (due to the disease) or indirectly (due to the pandemic’s impact on health systems and society). Deaths linked indirectly to Covid-19 are attributable to other health conditions for which people were unable to access prevention and treatment because health systems were overburdened by the pandemic.’
It is no brainer that a more readily and widely available vaccine regime could have drastically reduced the number of Covid-related deaths.
This is in addition to the lack of financial support that developing countries received from rich, advanced countries, and multilateral institutions in terms of, for instance, debt moratorium/relief, enhanced SDR allocation, and climate finance which, in turn, could have been used to improving country’s capacity of vaccines, and also in improving the capacity of public health sector. So, on one hand vaccine apartheid was practiced, and on the other IPRs were kept that did not allow appropriate level of production of vaccine.
It was hoped that the WTO and its participants at MC12 would use this opportunity to reverse back on these follies. Unfortunately, however, ‘profit-over-people’ mindset has once again prevailed. Hence, little positive came out of these ministerial meetings as pointed out, for instance, in a recently published article ‘Rich states finally kill vaccine-waiver proposal at WTO’ which indicated: ‘The World Trade Organization (WTO) reached a deal on patents for Covid-19 vaccines early on Friday (17 June), after a deadlock of nearly two years – since India and South Africa submitted a joint proposal to waive intellectual property rights of vaccines worldwide.
The agreement, however, will continue to enforce patents and intellectual property rights of Covid-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics, and other technologies — a key demand from the EU, the UK, and Switzerland which have been major blockers of the waiver proposal. The deal only waives one subclass of one article of the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, removing a ban on exporting vaccines procured under a compulsory licence.’
The outcome at MC12 indicates the power that the vested interest groups enjoy in the international policy framework, given, as per the same article, ‘The proposal to waive patents and intellectual property rights has been backed by 100 countries, the World Health Organization (WHO), over 300 civil society groups, plus Nobel laureates, former heads of state, MEPs, medical experts and trade unions.’ Yet, it still overall got defeated, even after more than two years of struggle to get IPRs on Covid vaccines removed. That highlights the depth of rot at the WTO, and in the overall multilateral policy framework.
The same article pointed out dismay of the supporters of this proposal to waive IPRs on Covid vaccine as campaigners slammed the deal reached at the 12th WTO ministerial meeting in Geneva, arguing that the text still protects pharma monopolies in rich countries and may have little effect in practice. They also argued that some WTO members were given no time to review the final text that they agreed to, which could be against procedure rules. “[This] is a technocratic fudge aimed at saving reputations, not lives,” said Max Lawson, campaigner at Oxfam, adding that the attitude of rich countries has been “utterly shameful”.
Historically speaking, this kind of injustice at the WTO is not out of context — rich and powerful vested interests of individual countries and corporations have mostly remained on the right side of benefits from WTO at the cost of developing countries’ sufferings.
A 2014 published book ‘What’s wrong with the WTO and how to fix it’ by Rorden Wilkinson pointed out the following: ‘Exaggerated claims concerning the value of the benefits from GATT/WTO negotiations notwithstanding…, the outcome of successive trade rounds has produced neither significant value not opportunity for the broad swathe of non-industrial states…we have failed to see that the system is not only broken but it is complicit in the perpetuation of this sorry state of affairs.
The problem — which we need to recognize and move quickly away from — is that what has passed for multilateral liberalization under the GATT/WTO has been treated, rather uncritically, as a synonym for free or freer trade, and not understood as a managed form of regulation strategically applied in pursuit of the specific and particular interests of the leading industrial states (Wilkinson, 2011).’
It is sad to say the least that Nzogi Okonjo-Iweala, WTO Director-General (DG) supported the decision of not providing the IPRs waiver on Covid vaccines, where a recent AP News published article ‘WTO ministers reach deals on fisheries, food, Covid vaccines’ pointed out: ‘But Okonjo-Iweala said the waiver of intellectual property protections “will contribute to ongoing efforts to concentrate and diversify vaccine manufacturing capacity so that a crisis in one region does not leave others cut off.”’
This is an unfortunate statement given knowledge sharing is important for a dangerously mutating Covid-virus, and also because the base-knowledge for big pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines came from research that was funded by taxpayers’ money, so it would not be asking too much if profits could be curtailed to allow both knowledge sharing and increasing much-needed production capacity. Yet after more than two years into the pandemic, and request for IPR waivers, this message could not get home to WTO. In a very much non-neoliberal world of the 1950s, on the contrary to the stance behind not providing waivers on Covid vaccine, the developer of Polio vaccine, Jonas Salk argued against profiteering and patenting from the discovery of Polio vaccine, and famously remarked: ‘There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’
That is the power of moneyed interest in a neoliberal world, in both influencing domestic public policy of rich, advanced countries, and multilateral institutions, including the WTO, to overall value ‘profits-over-people’. In a recently released report ‘Profiting from pain’ by Oxfam, the exorbitant extent of profits that have already been made by big pharma, but which are somehow not enough — where profit should not have been the main driver, since governments can always and have been supporting research in a big way in many advanced countries, and for many decades – have been highlighted as ‘The pandemic has created 40 new pharmaceutical billionaires, profiting from the monopolies their companies hold over vaccines, treatments, tests, and personal protective equipment.
Most of this personal fortune is thanks to billions in public funding — for instance, from R&D grants and procurement. …Pharmaceutical giants are making over $1,000 a second in profit from vaccines alone and they are charging governments up to 24 times more than it would cost to produce vaccines on a generic basis. Companies in the pharmaceutical sector have repeatedly been found to be dodging their tax responsibilities across the world by using tax havens and aggressive tax practices.’ The most unfortunate part, and that appears to be quite telling, as per the same AP news published article, is: ‘Her [WTO DG’s] announcement a year ago that the U.S. would break with many other developed countries with strong pharmaceutical industries to work toward a waiver of WTO rules on COVID-19 vaccines served as an impetus to talks around a broader waiver sought by India and South Africa.’
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022
The writer holds a PhD in Economics degree from the University of Barcelona, and has previously worked at the International Monetary Fund. His contact on ‘X’ (formerly ‘Twitter’) is @omerjaved7
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