14/06/2021

by Nino Sergi on Vita.it

Isn’t it perhaps considered unbecoming for a father or a mother to help only one child when the other three also have the same need?  That a mayor in the face of a hundred indigents provides assistance to only ten? That a government limits itself to scheduling anti-Covid vaccinations for only a fifth of its population? Wherever you see them from, these are unbecoming and condemnable choices. Serious if adopted within the G7 framework.

One billion doses by 2022 (!) could mean 500 million double-dose vaccines. Coming from countries that intend to have world leadership, they are very few in the face of the approximately 10 billion doses needed.

It is irresponsible that at least a broader 2021-2022 plan has not been outlined: with programming of further supplies, with invitations to other OECD countries and to manufacturing companies, with precise and timed commitments in order to ensure the doses necessary to eradicate the pandemic on every continent. Irresponsible and politically incoherent. These are mistakes that pay off.

A broader plan, without excluding serious consideration of the implementation of the TRIPS agreements ( Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) of the WTO, World Trade Organization, which provide that a temporary derogation from intellectual property rights may be adopted in the face of particularly serious situations. Perhaps 120 million infections worldwide, 2.5 million deaths, the spread of new threatening variants of Covid-19 do not represent a very serious situation? Presidents Biden and Draghi have already spoken out in favor of temporarily suspending patents, until global immunity is achieved. The General Council of the WTO will have to express itself again: for the G20 and for the EU – with the still too hesitant president of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen – it is an opportunity to repair the short-sighted political vision shown in Cornwall, joining the request of India and South Africa supported by developing countries.

“If it is true that the protection of intellectual property can favor the expansion of research, risk taking and appropriate investments, it is equally true that, for the anti-Covid vaccine, the pharmaceutical companies that produce it have already been able to benefit from huge public funding for research and risk coverage and that the current marketing of products is producing staggering revenues for them”. This is what the president of LINK 2007 Roberto Ridolfi wrote to Mario Draghi on 22 February ( see VITA ),  recalling the words pronounced by the Prime Minister: “Health must be understood as a global public good and for this reason Italy requests that equitable, universal and mass access to vaccines is a non-negotiable imperative”.

Now coherence and political vision.