Corona vaccines: EU prevented fair distribution

At the beginning of the corona pandemic, the EU promised fair distribution of vaccines worldwide. research by monitor show how the EU Commission and vaccine manufacturers prevented this and hundreds of millions of people got nothing.

The promises were big in the first year of the pandemic. In May 2020, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for a joint effort to produce corona vaccines and medicines as quickly as possible. According to the President of the Commission, these should then be taken “to every single corner of the world”.

The EU seemed serious. “In negotiations with the pharmaceutical industry, the Commission (…) will advocate for Covid-19 vaccine as a global public good.” What’s more, the Commission will try to advocate the “sharing of intellectual property” against the pharmaceutical industry, “especially if this intellectual property was developed with public support”.

The formulation comes from an agreement between the EU Commission and the member states from June 2020. It is still largely unknown even among experts and is now fueling criticism of the actual policies of the EU at the height of the pandemic. “Neither the member states nor the EU Commission acted accordingly. Rather, they did the opposite,” says Belgian MEP Kathleen van Brempt in an interview with the ARDmagazine monitor.

Not interested in vaccine justice?

Research by the Brussels organization “Corporate Europe Observatory” (CEO) and monitor now show that a fair distribution of vaccines was not pursued in the EU from the start. In July 2020, it was said that it was “important” to “separate” the commitment to vaccine justice from the EU’s vaccine purchasing. This emerges from EU protocols for vaccine procurement. As a result, the EU states secured billions of vaccine doses that they had bought at top prices and also blocked the release of patents on corona vaccines.

At the end of 2020, India and South Africa had applied to the World Trade Organization for the patents on Covid-19 vaccines, but also drugs and tests to be released. This should also allow production facilities in the Global South to start producing the vaccines. Despite the support of the application by the World Health Organization (WHO) and numerous other countries, the EU Commission blocked the application and, according to internal reports, even described the suspension of patent protection as “the worst possible scenario”.

“Manufacturers got their money back twenty times over”

A central argument of the EU Commission as well as the manufacturers against a patent release are the billions that have been invested in the development of the vaccines. Without the prospect of profits, there will no longer be any incentive for new research in the future.

Van Brempt fought for the release of the patents for a long time and countered that a lot of public money went into research and development of the vaccines. Of course, the manufacturers would have invested money themselves. But: “Because we bought all these vaccines for the European population, the manufacturers got their money back ten or twenty times. Why does it have to be unlimited?”

Lobbyists warn against suspension of patent protection

However, the EU blocked the suspension of the patents from the start – in the spirit of the pharmaceutical industry, which had campaigned massively against this, especially in the member states and the EU Commission. In December 2020, representatives of the pharmaceutical lobby association “EFPIA” spoke directly to the EU Commission.

In a letter, the lobbyists warned massively against the suspension of patent protection for corona vaccines: It was “an extreme measure for an unidentified problem”, it says. Critics can’t understand that at all. “At that moment we were at the peak of the pandemic,” says CEO Hans van Schren. “Hundreds of thousands of people died and the pharmaceutical industry is saying to the Commission: There is no problem, we will produce enough vaccine for the whole world. Today we know that they just didn’t do that.”

“We knew we would be late”

The EU Commission can monitor-Request still does not recognize any error on the part of the EU. The EU has helped to massively expand the production of the coveted vaccines in Europe and vaccines have been exported from the EU all over the world.

In fact, hardly any vaccines initially arrived in the poorer countries. According to a UNICEF list, just 16 vaccine doses per hundred inhabitants had been delivered to African countries by the end of September 2021. In the EU there were 157 cans – around ten times as much.

The South African doctor and activist Lydia Cairncross experienced the consequences of this shortage first hand: “In May we hadn’t even vaccinated the elderly – almost six months after the vaccine was available in the world. We saw the third wave coming and we knew we’d be late.”

Study: Many deaths were preventable

A study by Imperial College London, published last week, estimates that around 600,000 deaths could have been avoided if the World Health Organization’s target of vaccinating at least 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 had been met. But even as the unequal distribution of vaccines became increasingly clear in 2021, the EU Commission and member states were apparently less concerned with the possible consequences of their policies than with their own image.

This is shown, for example, in internal minutes from the Trade Policy Committee, the CEO and monitor available exclusively. In January 2021, for example, it says that the rejection of patent approval must be “communicated constructively to civil society”. In November 2021, when the global inequality in vaccine distribution led to fierce criticism worldwide, the minutes only said that they would “prepare well for the foreseeable ‘black Peter game’.”

“Sometimes you marvel at the madness of the world,” says Cairncross. “If this pandemic hasn’t changed the way we think – what needs to happen for us to think differently and not just within our borders or our provinces or our continents?”

You can see more on this topic today at 9:45 p.m. in the Monitor program on the first.