Professional Documents
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eu
37–47 minutes
“Is that a direct threat? I don’t know.” The adviser to the Belgian
prime minister spoke calmly as they recounted a lobbying phone
call from 2021, but the contents of the conversation are
extraordinary.
Big Pharma used its vast lobbying and influencing efforts to try
to kill a proposal that threatened the very tenets of the industry.
Top industry executives enjoyed direct access to senior officials
within the EU, which was opposed to the proposal from the very
start and encouraged potentially rogue member countries,
including Italy and France, to fall into line. And the U.S., after a
dramatic late intervention in favor of a waiver for vaccines, eight
months after the proposal had been tabled, failed to follow
through as the Biden administration came under pressure from
industry and Congress, as reported by the Intercept.
Victor do Prado, who until earlier this year was one of the top
officials at the WTO, said it was difficult to say whether a waiver
would have boosted production, but calls the response to the
proposal symptomatic of the “unilateral, nationalistic response”
to COVID-19.
The adviser insisted that the call from the Janssen lobbyist did
not change Belgium’s position and that such conversations were
“what every lobbyist does.” Belgium believed a waiver may have
boosted vaccine production by a small amount — no more than
10 percent — but that this was not worth disrupting the country’s
pharma industry, including R&D at universities.
Sometimes the industry did not even need to issue such threats.
A number of officials from countries that received no direct
pressure from pharmaceutical companies still said that their
countries decided their positions on the waiver with Big Pharma
in mind.
Mexico also had one eye on Big Pharma. It did not support the
waiver because it believed that compulsory licensing and
voluntary deals between pharmaceutical companies and third-
party manufacturers would be a better fit. But it also knew that
backing the waiver could hurt investment, a Mexican official told
POLITICO and the Bureau.
Lobby talk
But it was not until October that the radical proposal to waive
aspects of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), was first put forward at the
WTO in Switzerland by India and South Africa.
Then, four days after the proposal, the EFPIA met again with the
Commission, this time with the competition commissioner’s
cabinet member responsible for trade, Nele Eichhorn.
The industry had invested more than €39.6 billion into R&D in
the region during 2020 and over the next two years it spent tens
of millions more to lobby key EU officials on COVID-19, analysis
shows.
Civil society groups who supported the waiver lobbied too, but
had only a fraction of the firepower of their industry
counterparts. An analysis of health-related lobbying by the 105
organizations that support the People’s Vaccine Alliance,
alongside Doctors Without Borders, shows about 60 meetings
with senior Commission officials, roughly two-thirds as many as
the pharmaceutical industry. In the U.K., there were 20
meetings.
And in the U.K., two days after a position document from the
Quad leaked and was reported by POLITICO in mid-March,
Britain’s biotech lobby met George Freeman, a science minister,
“to discuss intellectual property and the life sciences sector.”
Germany was a huge driving force behind the EU’s stance — its
total opposition to a waiver was consistently backed by
countries including Ireland, Sweden and Denmark at the trade
policy committee. These three countries also house significant
pharmaceutical industries: Ireland is the largest net exporter in
the EU of pharmaceutical products; they make up Sweden’s
second-largest export category in value; and almost a fifth of
Denmark’s total goods exports, according to industry bodies.
He added that around half of the meetings the EFPIA had with
the Commission between January 2020 and July 2022 were
“unrelated to COVID-19 and focussed on other areas of EU
medicines policy, and often held at the request of the European
Commission or Parliament.”
The U.S. decision to announce its support for a waiver that was
limited to vaccines — i.e. one that excluded COVID-19
treatments — could have been the moment everything changed.
Some said it felt like a waiver was now genuinely possible, given
the influence of the U.S. at the WTO. “We were really in shock
when they supported the waiver,” said an official from one
country who opposed the waiver. “Once you have the U.S.
support, it gives you a lot of strength … it got momentum.”
The other factor, they said, was “stakeholders that were in very
different places on the issue,” which made it difficult to create a
proposal text. “You’ve got the pharmaceutical companies on one
end, obviously not wanting it, you’ve got the NGO community,
different folks pushing for different things. And we have all sorts
of people in between.”
Waive goodbye
The Pfizer staffer replied, saying the EFPIA was putting this
material together. In September the data was released, setting
out the nightmare that the industry saw looming. The industry’s
analysis showed that 135,627 drugs and test patents would be
directly impacted. A three-year waiver would also lead to a 25
percent drop in research and development in high-income
countries, the lobby group claimed.
The U.S., which backed a waiver only for COVID vaccines, had
not yet decided its position on treatments and therapeutics when
POLITICO and the Bureau interviewed the senior trade official.
Last year, their support was restricted to vaccines, because “at
that time … the key is to get shots in arms, and it’s to facilitate
the production of vaccines.”
Already there is concern that the delays that plagued the original
discussions will be repeated. A Geneva-based official from a
lower middle-income country that supported the waiver
predicted there would be no decision this year because of how
strongly some countries, particularly the U.K. and Switzerland,
will oppose IP flexibility on COVID-19 treatments. Switzerland
told POLITICO and the Bureau that it “does not consider that
intellectual property is a barrier to accessing COVID-19
diagnostics and therapeutics.”
Proponents of the waiver are not going away. The official from
the lower middle-income country called for the political will to
“question the system” and ensure developing countries were
better prepared for future emergencies. “The rules of the IP are
very important, we respect that, we believe in that. But we also
want to call to attention the actual problems, the inequalities,
and the gap that we have, and how the system can really help.”
“This has not been our proudest moment, but we did make
some headway,” she said.
As the discussion continues around treatments and tests, she
says that governments should “stand up and do their role, which
is to break their monopoly and allow the sharing of technology,
intellectual property and knowledge so that there’s more
production — not just [of] vaccines but of treatments and
diagnostics all over the world.”
“COVID was the real moment for that change. It hasn’t come.
But I can tell you we will win this sooner than later.”