Biden Must Lead Effort to Vaccinate the Global South. No One is Safe Until Everyone is Safe.

Interview with Ben Levenson, deputy director of Justice is Global, conducted by Scott Harris

The coronavirus pandemic reached a grim milestone when on Nov. 1, the total of COVID-related deaths around the world reached 5 million. The U.S. has the highest number of COVID fatalities at nearly 750,000, followed by large death tolls in Brazil and India.

While the U.S. and other wealthy nations have a surplus of vaccine, a high rate of vaccination – and many now administering a third booster shot, the majority of poor nations around the globe are unable to access enough vaccine to protect their people. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates there is a shortfall of 500 million doses in the global South, while 240 million doses are unused in the West. The number of surplus doses is projected to reach 600 million by the end of the year.

The alarming disparity in vaccine distribution, or “vaccine apartheid” as some have labeled it, has motivated some U.S. activists to engage in direct action to pressure the Biden administration to do more to get vaccines to nations in the global South. The group Justice is Global recently held an all-night vigil at the home of President Biden Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients, urging him to do everything possible to vaccinate the world against the coronavirus pandemic. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Ben Levenson, deputy director of Justice is Global, who talks about what the U.S. can do along with other nations, to send vaccines where they’re desperately needed.

BEN LEVENSON: The vast majority of public health researchers, experts and Nobel laureates who are Nobel economists say that if we were living in a world that was trying to actually end the pandemic, we would get vaccines to the folks in developing countries first. Health workers, folks on the frontlines. And we’re really doing the opposite. We’re giving vaccines to folks in rich countries. We have booster shots now, while folks in many African countries have less than 1 percent of the entire population vaccinated. How many health workers still are not vaccinated in African countries? We’re almost a year into having vaccines that (are) highly effective. This has led almost directly to the Delta variant, which has now become one of the dominant variants in rich countries, and is threatening people who are even already vaccinated. And so I think this is like what we can see as the beginning of a problem that, unless we address it, it will become endemic. It’s a thing that we will never solve and COVID comes back year after year. We have to get booster shots like we get the flu vaccines year after year, and people in low-income countries continue to experience the suffering and the uncertainty and the deaths that we’re in together right now — so we’re really concerned about this and trying to address the problem at the root cause.

SCOTT HARRIS: Ben, the Biden administration some months ago issued patent waivers for the coronavirus vaccines. But they have not done what they could do, according to your group and others, to pressure the pharmaceutical companies to share the manufacturing process so that poor nations around the world can make their own vaccines and distribute them locally. Could you say a word about that?

BEN LEVENSON: There’s another wrinkle to this. So the U.S. government supported the waiver on intellectual property. But it actually has not passed yet because of the opposition of Germany, Switzerland and the UK at the World Trade Organization. One piece of campaigning is to push global leaders and particularly the leaders of these European countries to support the waiver. And this waiver essentially just changes the rules so that folks in global south countries could produce vaccines and not be hit with multi-billion dollar lawsuits. So this piece around vaccine waiver is hugely important. It would allow many more producers to really make vaccines and there’s precedent for it. In South Africa in 2002, there was a historic victory around, and led by social movement groups in South Africa who were experiencing this like the height of the AIDS crisis.

They won a waiver similar to this, which allowed them to get anti-retroviral treatments and make generic versions and mass produce them so that folks in South Africa could get access to them. And, they had a similar kind of waiver. And what it did was it allowed many more anti-retrovirals to be produced. And because it created generics, it reduced the cost from $10,000 per dose, per year to $60 per dose per year, which allowed low-income countries to be able to access that. And so we’re asking for essentially the same thing. We need a waiver like that. And the U.S. government supports it. It was a historic move on May 5th for the U.S. government to support the waiver, but there’s other pieces to an agenda that would allow us to really get to let the 14 billion that we need.

So you talked about technology transfer. Technology transfer is one of the other steps. So the waiver on intellectual property just changes the rules. But if we actually want to support manufacturing, we could share the recipe for the vaccines that we currently have. These highly effective MRNA vaccines were largely funded by the U.S. government. So the U.S. government spent like close to $2 billion on the development of the Moderna vaccine. And I think the total now, including purchases has spent over $10 billion to date on the vaccine in general. That gives us a lot of leverage with these companies to be able to say we’ve funded this, taxpayers have funded the production of this vaccine and taxpayers want to see that be used for public ends. And currently that’s not what’s happening. The vaccine has been monopolized by Moderna and by Pfizer and the other major pharma companies to make a lot of money off of them.

And so we’ve seen a bunch of new billionaires for the Forbes billionaire list and tens of billions in profits for these companies who are explicitly not sharing the waiver they’d been asked to do so voluntarily, and they’re explicitly not doing that. So one of our other demands is for the U.S. government to use the power that it has to really share the recipe and compel these companies to do so. And as far as we can tell, we have the power under the Defense Production Act to be able to say, this is for national security, we need to use these patents in this technology to address this major global problem. And so, we really want to have a more transparent conversation about the law and that would be a major step towards getting vaccines for everyone.

For more information visit Justice Is Global at justiceisglobal.org.

 

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