Ex-leaders urge US to waive vaccine property rights

PARIS • About 170 former country leaders and Nobel Prize laureates have called on the United States to waive intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines to give poorer countries faster access to the drugs.

In an open letter to President Joe Biden published on Wednesday, the group said it was "gravely concerned by the very slow progress" in scaling up global vaccine access and inoculation in low-and middle-income countries.

While the vaccination roll-out in the US and many wealthier countries was bringing hope to their citizens, "for the majority of the world, that same hope is yet to be seen", said the signatories, who include Nobel Prize winners Muhammad Yunus, Joseph Stiglitz and Mohamed ElBaradei, and former world leaders Mikhail Gorbachev, Francois Hollande and Gordon Brown.

The group said it was encouraged that the Biden administration was considering a temporary waiver of World Trade Organisation intellectual property rules during the Covid-19 pandemic, as proposed by South Africa and India.

Such a waiver would be "a vital and necessary step to bringing an end to this pandemic" as it would expand global manufacturing capacity, "unhindered by industry monopolies that are driving the dire supply shortages blocking vaccine access".

Full protection of intellectual property and monopolies would have a negative impact on efforts to vaccinate the world and be self-defeating for the US, the group said in the letter coordinated by the People's Vaccine Alliance, which groups organisations and activists campaigning for an end to property rights and patents for vaccines.

"Were the virus left to roam the world, and even if vaccinated, people in the US would continue to be exposed to new viral variants," the group said.

The letter comes days after the World Health Organisation (WHO) condemned the scarcity of Covid-19 vaccine doses available for poorer nations.

"There remains a shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last Friday.

By then, more than 732 million Covid-19 vaccine doses had been administered in at least 195 territories, according to an Agence France-Presse count. About 49 per cent of the doses were injected in high-income countries accounting for 16 per cent of the global population.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE