Today the White House announcement, anticipated yesterday by the Washington Post, regarding the sending of a first batch of 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to 92 low and middle-income countries, including those of the African Union.
Just on the eve of Joe Biden ‘s trip to Europe, the first stop in Britain, the US president had said: “They will announce a world strategy for vaccines”. And so it was. Backward from the president’s announcement at the beginning of May on the suspension of vaccine patents
Maybe yes.
While Biden is therefore on a mission to the EU and makes it known that the first donations will arrive at the end of June, the White House specifies that “200 million doses will be delivered by the end of this year and the remaining 300 million by the first half of 2022 “. Synergy with the Covax program to allocate doses to low and middle income nations.
In the meantime, however, Europe is taking different decisions. Indeed, the European Parliament has called for the temporary revocation of the protection of intellectual property rights on vaccines. However, as the Huffington Post explains, we are talking about the suspension of compulsory licenses, not the intellectual property on patents.
With 355 votes in favor, 263 against and 71 abstentions, the classroom proposed a resolution to initiate a temporary waiver of the WTO Trips agreement “in order to improve global access to Covid-19-related medicines at affordable costs and to address the constraints of world production and supply shortages “.
“Voluntary licensing (when the vaccine developer decides to whom and under what conditions the patent can be licensed to allow production), know-how and technology transfer to countries with vaccine manufacturing industries are the most important way to accelerate global production in the long term, ”said the deputies.
The parliamentarians called for “the rapid elimination of export barriers and the replacement of its export authorization mechanism with export transparency requirements”.
“The United States and the United Kingdom, for their part, should”, again according to MEPs, “immediately abolish their ban on the export of vaccines and raw materials”. 11 billion doses are needed to immunize 70% of the world population and “only a fraction of this amount has been produced”.
“The EU must support production in Africa”, underlined the Parliament, which encourages incentives for the Covax vaccine program. Finally, MEPs called for “full disclosure of future advance purchase agreements, especially for next generation vaccines, and that such contracts include transparency requirements for suppliers.”
The EU Commission, however, is not at all convinced that this could be the best way to make vaccines affordable for less wealthy countries.
“We take note of the resolution of the European Parliament” on the revocation of vaccine patents “and we are analyzing it. As stated several times, we are open to discussing any options that may extend vaccine production. We are not convinced that revocation is the best immediate response “.
These are the words of a spokeswoman for the European Commission, who also recalled that “last week we presented two proposals to the WTO with which we offer various options”. In fact, on Friday the Commission presented to the WTO a proposal that insists on the application of existing rules and on the need to stop export restrictions.
[Photo from Joe Biden’s twitter profile – @JoeBiden]

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