Vaccinating the world

Many countries, the U.S. not among them, have asked the World Trade Organization to temporarily waive patent rights to the formulas for the COVID-19 vaccines, as well as the necessary technology to make them. Pharmaceutical companies would lose income, of course, but this measure would allow all countries on every continent to pool resources and produce the otherwise-expensive vaccines for themselves.

In this way, worldwide herd immunity would be achieved years earlier than thought possible.

Not surprisingly, Big Pharma is fiercely resisting. Fearing loss of monopoly control and future profits, these corporations lobby Congress and the president, arguing that any waiver of patent rights, even a temporary one, undermines free enterprise. An industry like theirs, they say, takes major risks in research and development, with the single expectation that success will be crowned with high profits.

Otherwise, they ask, why take the risks?

But Big Pharma took no risks developing the COVID-19 vaccines. The U.S. government underwrote the costs. Therefore, it is not accurate to call these vaccines by company names. They are a precious collective possession.

Unless 7.75 billion people on this planet get vaccinated quickly, mutations will arise and spread. Soon, we may be saddled with variants against which current vaccines will be impotent. And then the whole ugly nightmare we are still enduring starts over.

This issue is now before the White House and Congress. Reluctant representatives and senators, heavily indebted to Big Pharma, are nevertheless discussing joining the waiver movement, not simply because it’s right, but also because it’s in our national self-interest.

As Anna Marriott of Oxfam put it: “We need a people’s vaccine … to ensure that people all over the world who’ve already been vaccinated aren’t put at risk again.”

Please call your lawmakers and the president to support this waiver.

— Roger Fraser, Rolling Meadows