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Europe’s refusal to share COVID-19 vaccine technology could mask a major gathering of European and African leaders this week.
Europe wants to take advantage of this conference, 16 months late due to a pandemic, to advance relations in several ways, including trade and digital connectivity. However, access to vaccines is at the top of the agenda. African leaders are furious that the continent has received mere “crams” from the flooded vaccine plates of wealthy nations and has become far less protective of their population from the virus.
They look to a two-day summit between the EU and the African Union seeking evidence that Europe is serious about the bombing of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa as “vaccine apartheid.” prize. And Europe is showing no signs of moving to loosening access to the intellectual property of vaccines, which is a central issue for many African leaders.
“They stored vaccines and ordered more vaccines than their population needed. The greed they showed was disappointing, especially when they said they were our partners.” Said Ramaphosa in December. “Our life in Africa is just as important as life in Europe, North America, and around the world.”
The coronavirus pandemic puts health policy at the center of the relationship between the two continents. In particular, Europe has abandoned its vaccine patents and refused to allow its own developed jabs to be manufactured elsewhere at low cost. It also revealed how dependent African countries are on vaccines in other parts of the world.
Africa couldn’t produce it in its own country and ended up behind a line of life-saving coronavirus jabs. The numbers speak for themselves: less than 12 percent of Africa’s population is fully vaccinated. This is compared to about 71% of people in the EU.
Africa’s estimated mortality is lower than in Europe, but up to 40 million due to the economic impact of low immunization rates and the inability of the African government to provide suffering citizens with the same level of financial assistance as European responders. People are being driven into extreme poverty.
The inequality has driven a great impetus to boost the continent’s manufacturing capacity — so that Africans do not have to rely on the large western ones again when the next pandemic occurs. ..
The EU is keen to show the world what it understands. The block promised € 1 billion in efforts to increase manufacturing capacity and made approximately 145 million donations to Africa.
A draft document by POLITICO outlining the EU’s vision for the summit on Thursday says the continent wants to support “full-scale African health sovereignty” in responding to future public health emergencies. Emphasizes the desire of the block. This is the same as the African Union’s own playbook. The organization’s chairman, Senegalese President Macky Sall, said on February 5 that his ambition was “to secure our pharmaceutical and medical sovereignty as quickly as possible.”
However, observers are skeptical that the EU proposal is sufficient. The suggestion also avoids elephants in the room significantly. The fact that African countries haven’t spent months convincing the EU to uphold the demand to waive their intellectual property rights on coronavirus products.
Not an alliance
The controversy between the two unions is evident in the first line of the draft draft of the African Union’s Priority Summit Declaration. The EU’s proposal for the “Africa-Europe Alliance” is gone. Instead, the African Union is a group of all 55 countries with a total population of about 1.3 billion. We are looking for a new “partnership”.
“Alliance is a very geopolitical term,” said one person involved in the African Union text debate, explaining the backlash. Expectations are not high when entering the summit. “People, frankly, don’t expect more broadly than just health problems,” he said, demanding anonymity because of the sensitivity of the problem.
As part of that, there are two EU proposals for vaccines. “It’s more broadly important not only about sharing current vaccines, but also about their ability to produce vaccines and how they can support them in the long run in Africa,” said one EU diplomat. .. Ursula von der Leyen, chairman of the Commission, said at least 450 million doses would be shared with African countries by the summer. During a visit to Senegal a week before the summit, Von der Leyen announced an additional € 125 million to support the deployment of the vaccine.
In a broader sense, the EU’s proposed proposal emphasizes EU support for vaccine manufacturing efforts. Harmonization of regulatory system and technology transfer. However, EU diplomats have admitted that the proposal has been refined with some details that have not yet been resolved.
So far, the critical observers have not been taken over.
“What’s on the table right now is well below the level of ambition required by the EU, and this summit will actually take advantage of this new equal partnership we’ve heard,” ONE said. EU Director Emily Wigens has stated a campaign to end. Extreme poverty and preventable illness.
The trust between the two is severely undermined by the pandemic, Wigens said. “It is really the EU’s responsibility to use this summit to show that cooperation and solidarity are not dead,” she said.
Dimitri Eynikel, EU policy adviser to Doctors Without Borders Access Campaign, said the draft document has positive signs, including a focus on Africa’s health sovereignty. “But in reality, when you look at the details, you’re mostly recycling existing ones and providing a little more detail,” he said.
“It’s definitely possible”
At the heart of the problem is technology transfer. The EU draft refers to voluntary licensing if vaccine manufacturers agree to share vaccine manufacturing know-how. So far, it has been limited during the pandemic.
Yet, none of the companies behind the EU-approved coronavirus vaccine have agreed to involve African partners in the complete manufacturing process. Instead, the focus is on the final stage: filling and packaging the vials.
African countries want Western pharmaceutical companies to move further. In October 2020, South Africa and India, with the support of African Group, proposed to waive their vaccine-related intellectual property rights to enable wider production. The exemption does not force companies to share their knowledge of vaccine production, but it protects manufacturers from potential patent infringement claims if they want to produce their own vaccines.
The EU may prefer to continue discussions on the lifting of intellectual property rights to a closed-door meeting in Geneva, but it is clear that the African Union will not make it happen. The draft Declaration of the African Union, circulated on February 8 and seen by POLITICO, mentions the controversy.
The African Union has made it clear that the immediate concern is access to vaccines “as much as possible.”
The question is whether the summit can be a platform for the EU to propose new compromises. French President Emmanuel Macron seemed to suggest this in a statement to the European Parliament in January.
Macron said EU leaders have agreed to a global license for the coronavirus vaccine, removing the barriers to Africa’s ability, intellectual property and technology to produce its own vaccine. He said he wanted.
At that time, Geneva negotiators were confused by what the French president said. No such proposal was announced at the WTO. After all, the global license could actually be a rebranding of an existing proposal from the EU to focus on the use of compulsory vaccine licenses, three sources said about the French proposal. explained.
If so, it is unlikely that we will get along with African leaders. Eight months after the EU submitted its counter-proposal to the WTO, countries have not yet reached a compromise.
But what is clear is that vaccine equity is an important barometer of the success of the summit. In the end, the summit “if we can’t make progress due to IP and technology transfer issues … I think it’s a big disappointment,” said Wigens of the ONE campaign.
Additional report by Barabara Moens.
This article is part of PoliticoPremium Policy Services: Professional Healthcare. From drug prices, EMAs, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, etc., our professional journalists are always aware of the topics that drive the healthcare policy agenda. Email [email protected] Free trial.
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