'Vaccine nationalism' and 'hoarding' will slow down world's ability to recover from Covid-19
Dr Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, said: "No one is safe until everyone is safe, and the economic cost is huge."
"The longer the virus is left to ravage developing countries, the longer people in rich countries will remain at risk," an Oireachtas committee heard today.
The Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs heard from representatives from the United Nations and a Special Envoy on Covid-19 from the World Health Organization, who warned that "vaccine nationalism", "hoarding" and inability to share data will slow down the world's ability to recover from the pandemic.
"The tipping point is now, there is no time down the road," David Nabarro CBE, a Special Envoy on Covid-19 for the World Health Organization, said.
"Don't wait."
He called for a "vaccine challenge" where rich countries should organise to help poorer countries receive vaccines, so far the only country that has done so is New Zealand.
A number of Oireachtas representatives queried about the lack of vaccines available to people in Palestine, despite Israel's impressive rollout of the vaccine of their own citizens.
Dr Winnie Byanyima, the Executive Director of UNAIDS, called on Ireland to endorse The Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), which facilitates the sharing of intellectual property and knowhow over Covid-19, including for vaccines to increase the scale and speed of supplies globally.
"We know how to solve this problem: Maximising global production can happen only if all companies that can produce vaccines have access to the vaccine technology, the know-how and the intellectual property pharma companies will not share, unless pressed to do so.
"Governments have that leverage and there is a mechanism to enter into the sharing that. That is C-TAP. It's a one-stop shop for pooling data, know-how, biological material, and intellectual property, and then license production and technology transfer to other potential, producers.
"So far pharma companies have not joined the C-TAP and the proposal for a temporary waiver of certain TRIPS ( TRIPS Agreement is a minimum standards agreement for the protection of intellectual property) obligations has been blocked by the rich countries who host the pharma companies with a vaccine.
"This is not only about justice for the poor, the longer the virus is left to ravage developing countries, the longer people in rich countries will remain at risk.
"The virus is mutating and this threatens the efficacy of vaccines."
Yesterday, the South African government had to postpone its rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, because it doesn't have the efficacy against the South African variant of the virus.
The International Chamber of Commerce has released new research that predicts that delays to vaccine access in poorer countries will cost the whole global economy an estimated, $9 trillion, with nearly half of that being a cost to wealthy countries.
"Slow pace of vaccination everywhere, means that we risk seeing more dangerous variants," said Dr Winnie Byanyima.
"These vaccines, were developed with public money. These companies, depend on government support, we need to ensure that constraints on licencing and know-how no longer obstruct mass production of COVID vaccines. We need to make companies take part in CTAP and it is your governments that can make it happen."
