EU hits out at US stand on vaccine patent waiver

AFP

European Union leaders cranked up their criticism of the United States call to waive COVID-19 vaccine patents on Saturday, arguing the move would yield no short-term or intermediate improvement in vaccine supplies and could even have a negative impact.

On the second day of an EU summit in Portugal, the European leaders instead urged the US to lift export restrictions if it wants to have a global impact on the pandemic.

“We don’t think, in the short term, that it’s the magic bullet,” European Council President Charles Michel said.

French President Emmanuel Macron insisted that giving any priority now to a discussion of intellectual property rights “is a false debate.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, home to many Big Pharma companies, went the farthest of all, cautioning that relaxing patent rules could harm efforts to adapt vaccines as the coronavirus mutates.

“I see more risks than opportunities,” Merkel said. “I don’t believe that releasing patents is the solution to provide vaccines for more people.”

Instead, the leaders joined previous EU calls for US President Joe Biden to start boosting US vaccine exports as a way to contain the global COVID-19 crisis, insisting that move was the most urgent need.

“I’m very clearly urging the US to put an end to the ban on exports of vaccines and on components of vaccines that are preventing them being produced,” Macron said.

He mentioned Germany’s CureVac, saying it could not produce a COVID-19 jab in Europe because the necessary components were blocked in the US. Hundreds of components can go into a vaccine.

Merkel said she hoped that “now that large parts of the American population have been vaccinated, there will be a free exchange of (vaccine) ingredients.”

“Europe has always exported a large part of its European (vaccine) production to the world, and that should become the rule,” the longtime German leader said.

While the US has kept a tight lid on exports of American-made vaccines so it can inoculate its own population first, the EU has become the world’s leading provider, allowing about as many doses to go outside the 27-nation bloc as are kept for its 446 million inhabitants.

The EU has distributed about 200 million doses within the bloc while about the same amount has been exported to almost 90 countries.