'Developing nations may give up on the WTO for good if it won’t budge on vaccine patents', 29 November 2021

"Late on Friday, with only days to go until its 12th summit was due to commence, the World Trade Organization (WTO) announced that its most important meeting of the year couldn’t proceed. With alarm spreading about the Omicron Covid-19 variant, the WTO’s host country, Switzerland, closed its borders to southern Africa and introduced quarantine restrictions for visitors from Belgium, Israel and Hong Kong, where cases have been detected, making travel for many government delegations impossible. The summit, billed as critical for an institution in crisis, is now indefinitely postponed.

The irony, not lost on many delegates from Africa, Asia and Latin America, is that global trade rules overseen by the WTO are actually at the heart of the dreadful situation the world is now confronting.

Well over a year ago, India and South Africa called on the WTO to suspend part of an intellectual property agreement known as Trips, which allows pharmaceutical corporations to monopolise medical knowledge. Even though many Covid-19 vaccines and treatments were paid for from the public purse, Trips, the brainchild of a former big pharma executive, effectively means that the resulting medicines become the highly profitable property of a handful of the world’s biggest businesses.

India and South Africa’s proposal is backed by pretty much every southern government. They are also joined, in a somewhat lacklustre manner, by the United States and a smattering of wealthy countries, who are at least prepared to countenance the need for radical action in the face of staggering levels of vaccine inequality.

But the proposal is being blocked by Britain, Switzerland and the EU, defending big pharma and refusing to accept the need for change..."