UK undermines efforts to end COVID monopolies

This blog is written by Just Treatment patient leader Rajni Boddington.

CREDIT: Robin Millard/AFP/Getty Images

Trade Ministers from around the world met at the Twelfth Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) last week, a critical event which should finally have been an opportunity to break the impasse around ending deadly COVID monopolies. Instead, the UK has played a dishonest and damaging role in blocking any meaningful agreement. The result of this has been the announcement of a deal which will do little if anything to help scale up access, and which only applies to vaccines  - not tests and treatments.

Nearly two years ago, India and South Africa put a broad proposal on the table at the WTO to suspend monopolies on COVID related health tools - known as the TRIPs (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) waiver. The waiver was supported by over 100 mainly low and middle income countries and co-sponsored by more than 60 others. It would have made it much easier for dozens of qualified manufacturers around the world to scale up production of COVID vaccine and treatment so that millions more people could be protected against this devastating virus. 

Instead, wealthy governments like the UK came down on the side of the pharma companies, looking to protect the industry’s monopoly profits instead of the lives of people across the world. Boris Johnson and his government blocked this vital response to an unprecedented pandemic.

The bad deal announced last week, as developing countries were forced to give in to the bullying of rich countries like the UK & EU, bears little resemblance to the waiver proposal. It merely clarifies existing flexibilities in the TRIPs rules, offering only a slight simplification in rules on exports of vaccines. It is not going to make any difference to global access to vaccines. And it won’t change the course of the pandemic, as it only relates to vaccines with the exclusion of tests and treatments (though it does commit WTO members to review this in the coming months).

This outcome shows where western governments’ priorities lie – and it’s not mitigating the world’s health problems. Millions of people are dying needlessly while treatments that can cure them already exist. The restrictions of medicines and treatments for the sake of profits for a few companies backed by rich countries is sadly nothing new. Throughout this process, the UK government has played a shameful role in undermining the negotiations, doing their utmost to make a bad deal even worse - and then trying to lay the blame for the lack of agreement at the door of developing countries!

Earlier this month, I met politicians in parliament and asked them to support countries in the Global South in their quest to be able to make COVID-19 vaccines themselves and access the treatments that we in the West now take for granted. I have family in India, and their experience of accessing vaccines has been so varied - it shouldn’t be this way.

I’ve never met politicians in this way before, and it felt as if the hopes and futures of millions of people in the Global South were on my shoulders. It’s a complete outrage that so many of those decision-makers who can lift that weight don’t feel the same pressures or responsibilities. 

The desire for maximum profit should never override the need to protect human lives. But this latest pandemic has laid bare once again how global health inequality has devastating results. Surely there’s one thing we can all agree on – you can have all the wealth you want, but it’s nothing without health. The Government would do well to remember this.