Vaccinate the
Billions or Lose the Battle for Democracy
The EU should back a coordinated global industrial
strategy, including vaccine production facilities across the world, otherwise
China will plug the gap. That means challenging private-sector patent
monopolies.
·
April 13, 2021
“This is both a crisis and a big test for us,”
remarked Chinese President Xi Jinping in
February 2020. He was right. The coronavirus pandemic would become a major test
for every governing system in the world. By any fair account, China, as one of
the world’s new great powers, has passed with flying colors.
Xi has made extensive use of infrastructure investment
to expand Beijing’s global alliances. This was borne out at the UN when, in
July 2020, fifty-three countries supported
the Chinese position on a new national security law in Hong
Kong. They included many African states and significantly outnumbered the
twenty-seven predominantly Western states that spoke out against the law.
No wonder that vaccines could easily become China’s
next big win. That is all the more reason for democratic governments to act
strategically and soon. The G7 and the EU are
in strong positions to lead a truly global effort to vaccinate the world. But
this will mean taking a hard look at patents.
Despite all the arguments over vaccines in Europe, the
most important strategic element to the global picture has been missed. The
shortage of vaccines is not primarily a procurement problem—whether states can
afford to buy them—but a production one—whether states can be allowed to make
them.
This is why the EU’s issues with pharmaceutical
company AstraZeneca should be seen not as separate from the challenge facing
highly impoverished states but as conjoined to it. Both sets of difficulties
arise from the problem of vaccine patents limiting supply. The solution is
within the grasp of democrats: a coordinated, global industrial effort.
In the first phase of the pandemic, the relationship
between wealth and effective responses was indirect. While testing capacity has
been a problem in many states, the nonpharmaceutical methods that were key to
flattening the curve of the epidemic—lockdowns, quarantine, and contact
tracing—were often used effectively in poor and middle-income countries. This
is not the case in the pandemic’s new phase: the urgent need to vaccinate the
world.
China responded rapidly with its Health Silk Road
policy, which echoed the language of its Belt and Road infrastructure program,
and has already signed up scores of countries for
vaccine donations.
EU states are only slowly waking up to the rise of
Chinese soft power. In February, French President Emmanuel Macron urged EU
governments to respond with their own vaccine
diplomacy and send surplus supplies to African states. But he
and other European leaders continue to misdiagnose the vaccine problem as a
matter of procurement. In truth, a radical expansion of production is required.
That can happen only if private-sector patent monopolies are firmly challenged.
Governments have poured large amounts of public money
into producing these vaccines. The Moderna vaccine has been nearly
entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers but
is being sold at a fully commercial price for private profit. Even though some
other companies, like AstraZeneca, are charging much less per dose, they still
retain their patent rights over supply. This means that the full potential of
global production is simply not being realized.
South Africa and India have proposed a temporary suspension of
coronavirus patents. This would allow manufacturers all over the
world to join the global effort. The World Health Organization has backed this
demand and established a “COVID-19 Technology Access Pool”
to share knowledge and resources equitably and allow a rapid exit from the
pandemic.
There are signs that the White House may be prepared
to throw its huge political weight behind this effort. Speaker of the U.S. House of
Representatives Nancy Pelosi has written to U.S. President Joe
Biden to ask him to consider the question. And—in a revealing turn of events—it
was established in March that the U.S. government has patent
license claims over the Moderna, Johnson & Johnson,
Novavax, CureVac, and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. So, private monopoly control
has become even less justifiable. Meanwhile, question marks over the efficacy of the Chinese vaccines underline
the crucial global role the G7 and the EU must play.
This is a big opportunity for democracies to put
themselves on the right side of history. This is not a panacea. In the
fragmented, fluid circumstances of this century, authoritarian politics should
be viewed as an ongoing policy problem, which reflects the disruptions that all
societies are facing.
China’s authoritarian and ethnic nationalist turn
under Xi is hardly unique over the last decade—even if it takes very specific
forms compared with the wider landscape of democratic regression globally. But
perception matters. The legitimacy that Xi’s China has garnered is not
inconsequential to democracy’s future.
All the more reason for democracies to grasp that
strategic challenge. They need to show they can deliver with measures that
understand the scale of the crisis. A coordinated industrial strategy,
including vaccine production facilities across the world, is the kind of recipe
needed to regain the political momentum. Can Europe and the United States
summon the courage to do it?
Luke
Cooper is a consultant and associate researcher at LSE IDEAS, the foreign
policy think tank of the London School of Economics.
Luke Cooper is a
consultant and associate researcher at LSE IDEAS, the foreign policy think tank
of the London School of Economics.
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