Waive Covid-19 vaccine property rules, ex-world leaders urge US

More than 170 former national leaders and Nobel Prize winners have called on the US to waive intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines to give poorer countries faster access to inoculations.

A waiver would boost vaccine manufacturing and speed up the response to the pandemic in poorer countries which otherwise might have to wait years, they said in a joint letter to US President Joe Biden that was sent to news organisations late 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.

Nobel winners Muhammad Yunus, Joseph Stiglitz and Mohamed ElBaradei as well as former world leaders such as Mikhail Gorbachev, Francois Hollande and Gordon Brown all put their names to the letter.

While vaccination roll-out in the United States 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.

"President Biden has said that no one is safe until everyone is safe, and now with the G7 ahead there is an unparalleled opportunity to provide the leadership that only the US can provide," said Mr Brown, former British prime minister, referring to an upcoming meeting of the world's wealthiest countries.

It said that, based on the current pace of vaccine production, most poor nations will have to wait until at least 2024 to achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation.

"New mutations of the virus will continue to cost lives and upend our interconnected global economy until everyone, everywhere has access to a safe and effective vaccine," said Mr Stiglitz, a Nobel Economics Prize winner.

The group said it was "encouraged" that the Biden administration was considering a temporary waiver of World Trade Organisation intellectual property rules during the 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 negatively impact efforts to vaccinate the world and be self-defeating for the US, the group said in the letter co-ordinated by the People's Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 development organisations.

"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," they said.

The letter comes days after the World Health Organisation condemned the scarcity of Covid doses available to 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 doses of Covid-19 vaccines had been administered in at least 195 territories around the world, according to an AFP count.

But 49 per cent of the doses were injected in high-income countries accounting for 16 per cent of the global population.