They said the EU had launched a “belligerent blockade of any actual waiver of intellectual property barriers” and criticised the US for its “insistence that the IP waiver it supports be limited to vaccines”. The EU and US have also required countries to seek authorisation on a product-by-product basis, “meaning no simplified pathway for follow-on manufacturers to produce and enter the market”, they wrote.
The problems faced by Ramaphosa in seeking to move the sluggish decision-making apparatus at the WTO are compounded by the complexity of vaccine manufacture, which relies on more than just access to patent information. He knows that taking off the table the secrets behind treatments for Covid-19 severely limits the ability of poorer countries’ health systems from tackling further outbreaks of the disease.
Why would the EU and US play hardball? Moderna and Pfizer, which uses the German firm Biontech’s IP, will have new vaccines on the market by the autumn – known as “bivalent” vaccines, that address Omicron as well as the other previous incarnations of Covid-19.