Over 700 health experts are calling for urgent action to expand global production of COVID vaccines

Anupam Nath/AP

Deborah Gleeson, La Trobe University and Michael Toole, Burnet InstituteToday, we are joining over 700 health professionals and academics in sending an open letter to Prime Minister Scott Morrison urging him to take a leadership role in expanding the global production of COVID-19 vaccines and other medical tools to fight the pandemic.

The letter, signed by 207 doctors, 177 academics and 111 public health professionals, asks the government to help remove legal and technical barriers to increasing the production of COVID-19 vaccines, diagnostic tests, treatments and other equipment.

We argue there is more Australia — and other wealthy nations — can and should be doing to end the pandemic.

The need to act urgently

The COVID-19 pandemic is escalating sharply in the developing world. In addition to India’s spiralling infections, cases are surging across the globe in countries like Argentina, Uruguay, Sweden, France, Turkey, Mongolia, and Costa Rica.

The roll-out of vaccines must rapidly accelerate. Uncontained transmission will inevitably lead to the emergence of new variants that may be more infectious and resistant to vaccines.

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As of today, more than 1.06 billion vaccine doses have been administered worldwide. However, 37% of these doses have been given in the world’s 27 wealthiest countries. Those countries represent just 10.5% of the global population.

Meanwhile, countries making up the least wealthy 11% have received just 1.6% of the vaccine doses so far. At this pace, most of the world’s population will remain unprotected at least until 2023.

Vaccine shortages have been a frequent occurrence in India in recent weeks.
Rafiq Maqbool/AP

Monopolisation of vaccines

Two of the chief obstacles to vaccinating the world are the monopolisation of vaccines and the means of producing them. The world is relying on the pharmaceutical industry and market forces to solve the problems of inadequate supply and inequitable distribution — and this won’t work.

Rich countries have monopolised the world’s supply of vaccines by pre-purchasing doses in bulk. By November 2020, 7.5 billion doses had been reserved, half of these by rich countries making up only 14% of the global population.

Countries like Canada have far more vaccines than they need on order.
Paul Chiasson/AP

Rich countries have also under-invested in COVAX, the global program for equitably distributing vaccines. COVAX needs an additional US$3.2 billion just to meet its target of vaccinating 20% of populations of participating countries.

Added to this, countries faced with large outbreaks have erected export restrictions to bolster their own supply of vaccines, excluding others.

This includes the European Union’s refusal to release 3.1 million doses to Australia this year. India has also restricted vaccine exports, resulting in delays in delivering 90 million doses to low-income countries.

The US, too, has been stockpiling its supplies, though the Biden administration announced this week it will now allow the export of raw materials needed to manufacture vaccines in India.

Monopolies on the means of producing vaccines

While the hoarding of vaccines is a concern, the monopolies on the rights to produce them is an even bigger problem.

The exclusive rights to manufacture COVID-19 vaccines are currently held by a small number of companies. These intellectual property rights are enshrined in the World Trade Organization Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, otherwise known as TRIPS.

Under TRIPS, WTO members must allow patents of at least 20 years for new pharmaceutical products, along with other types of intellectual property protection.

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TRIPS allows nations to invoke compulsory licensing of pharmaceutical products, which enables patented inventions to be produced without the consent of the patent owner in an emergency.

But compulsory licensing can only be applied on a product-by-product basis, and it only applies to patents, not the other types of knowledge and data needed to manufacture vaccines.

Countries also tend to face diplomatic and trade pressure not to enact such licenses. To our knowledge, no country has yet issued a compulsory licence for a COVID-19 vaccine.

Reliance on the pharmaceutical industry and market forces

So far, the world has placed its trust in the pharmaceutical industry and market forces to solve the problem, hoping vaccine makers would voluntarily enter into licensing arrangements with other manufacturers to increase supply.

But voluntary licensing has been little used to date. When it has been used, it has been done in an ad hoc and opaque way, with restrictive conditions.

AstraZeneca, Gamaleya/Sputnik V and Sinopharm are so far the only companies to implement voluntary licensing for COVID-19 vaccines. AstraZeneca, for instance, has licensed SK Bio in South Korea, the Serum Institute of India and CSL in Australia to manufacture the vaccine.

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Other companies’ reluctance to enter into these arrangements means available manufacturing capacity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America is not being used.

The pharmaceutical industry is heavily invested in the status quo. Pfizer and Moderna expect to generate US$15 billion and US$18.4 billion in revenue respectively in 2021, just based on existing supply agreements.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance estimates Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca have distributed US$26 billion to their shareholders in the form of dividends and stock buybacks in the past 12 months – enough to cover the cost of vaccinating 1.3 billion people.

Pfizer/BioNTech’s goal is to produce 2.5 billion doses globally by the end of the year.
Michael Probst/AP

What Australia has done to help so far

Australia has been generous to date, providing AU$80 million to COVAX (specifically for low-income countries).

It has also pledged $523 million to the Regional Vaccine Access and Health Security Initiative, which provides health system support for vaccinations and $100 million to the Quad initiative by India, Japan, Australia and the US, which aims to distribute 1 billion doses in the Indo-Pacific region by 2022.

Australia has also provided 8,840 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine to PNG for frontline health workers and negotiated with the EU to free up 1 million of its own doses on order for PNG. Canberra has also pledged doses to Timor-Leste, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

These contributions are important stop-gaps to help address immediate needs. But they won’t go far enough on their own.

Further steps Australia needs to take

Increasing the global supply of vaccines will require governments to remove legal and technical barriers to their production.

To help remove legal barriers, the Australian government should support a proposal by India and South Africa in October 2020 to waive certain intellectual property rights for COVID-19 medical products.

This proposal, known as the “TRIPS Waiver”, is now supported by more than 100 of the WTO’s 164 member states. However, it has been blocked or stalled by the US, EU, Japan, Canada, and Australia.

Australia will have another chance to support it when it’s discussed at a TRIPS council meeting later this week.

To remove technical barriers, Australia must use its leverage to persuade pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge and transfer technology to low and middle-income countries.

Australia should also endorse the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), which was established last May by the World Health Organization but has so far been unused.

C-TAP relies on voluntary commitments by pharmaceutical companies. For it to work, governments need to provide incentives or require pharmaceutical companies to share their IP, data and know-how as a condition of public funding for research and development.

Over 700 health professionals and academics see the government’s leadership in these areas as a critical part of our pandemic response.

It’s time for Australia to act, and to encourage regional allies such as New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore to do the same.

Deborah Gleeson, Associate Professor in Public Health, La Trobe University and Michael Toole, Professor of International Health, Burnet Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sure, let’s bring production onshore, but it might not ensure supplies

Shutterstock

Naoise McDonagh, University of Adelaide

The pandemic has changed the way we think about supply chains, in particular the chains that feed our need for food, medical supplies, and defence equipment.

It has led Prime Minister Scott Morrison to frame access to supplies in terms of economic sovereignty.

Andrew Liveris, now an advisor to Morrison, and a former Dow Chemical Chief and advisor to both the Obama and Trump administrations, is pushing for re-shoring of critical supply chains.

“Australia drank the free-trade juice and decided that off-shoring was okay,” he is quoted as saying. “Well, that era is gone.”

But ensuring supplies can withstand shocks needn’t mean bringing production onshore. It might make it harder.

Stockpiling isn’t that useful

Firms usually talk about managing supply risk in terms of resilience or robustness.

Canada has a strategic maple syrup reserve.

Robustness is the ability to continue supplying during a disruption (for a while we didn’t have this with toilet paper).

Resilience is the ability to get supplies back to normal in an acceptable time frame (which we had with toilet paper).

For critical supplies, robustness is the most important, but it hard to achieve for entire categories such as “medical equipment”. There, stockpiling is of limited use.

The United States has a stockpile of oil, enough to fill half of its car tanks. Canada has a vault of maple syrup, called a “strategic reserve” – about 80,000 barrels worth.

But when it comes to stockpiling “medical equipment” we might put a lot of effort into stockpiling ventilators, for example, only to find that the next emergency requires something different, or a different type of ventilator.

And it’s hard to stockpile fresh food.

We are exposed at choke points

Face masks and food illustrate the risks.

Half of global facemask production is concentrated in China. China’s factories closed during its lockdown at the time global demand simultaneously soared, resulting in a major shortages.

Australia is one of the most food-secure nations on earth, exporting far more than it needs, but a 2012 department of agriculture report found that many of the inputs, including pesticides and packaging, especially long-life packaging, were made overseas.

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We got a taste of that vunerability in March 2020. After drought-breaking rains across the country generated a spike in demand for these essential farm inputs, supply tightened due to coronavirus-related restrictions in China.

The crunch led Australian farm supply firm Nufarm to publically warn that Australia was dangerously dependent upon China.

Disasters can happen here too

The best way to achieve supply chain robustness is to build supply chains involving more than one supplier, located in more than one national territory.

While worth considering as part of the solution, re-shoring won’t achieve this.

Japan’s 2011 Japan earthquake illustrates the point. Japan is self-sufficient in auto parts, but the earthquake hit the region that supplies them.

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If we do re-shore, it will make sense to continue to use at least one international supplier to ensure diversification. Self sufficiency isn’t the same as robustness.

Building robustness will require a federally-directed supply chain risk diversification strategy.

Self-sufficiency isn’t robustness

Given the extent of our trade with China, the best approach might be China-Plus-One. It could mean one stream of the supply of a good coming through China and another coming through, for example, Vietnam.

It’s an approach adopted by Japan.

Re-shoring can play a role, but we are going to need a top-down assessment of the risks facing supplies of critical goods, and quite possibly the imposition of robustness requirements on firms distributing them.

Those firms can be offered a diversification tax credit.

A robustness strategy would be more likely to be pro-trade rather than anti-trade, but we won’t know until we do the work. It’d be best to start before the next crisis.

Naoise McDonagh, Lecturer in Political Economy, Institute for International Trade, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Decline of traditional media

Should the threat to traditional media from the internet really be a cause for concern?

The new social media — blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and YouTube are current faves — revolutionising the publishing world, for better and worse. Let’s look at both the better and the worse in perspective.

The current tsunami of personal choices in communication is slowly draining the profit from mainstream media. These media traditionally depend on huge audiences who all live in one region and mostly want the same things (the football scores, the crossword, the TV Guide, etc.). But that is all available now on the Internet, all around the world, all the time.

One outcome is a death watch on many newspapers, including famous ones like the Boston Globe. As journalist Paul Gillin noted recently: “The newspaper model scales up very well, but it scales down very badly. It costs a newspaper nearly as much to deliver 25,000 copies as it does to deliver 50,000 copies. Readership has been in decline for 30 years and the decline shows no signs of abating. Meanwhile, new competition has sprung up online with a vastly superior cost structure and an interactive format that appeals to the new generation of readers.”

Traditional electronic media are not doing any better. As James Lewin observes in “Television audience plummeting as viewers move online” (May 19, 2008), mainstream broadcasters “will have to come to terms with YouTube, video podcasts and other Internet media or they’ll face the same fate as newspapers.”

Radio audiences have likewise tanked. Overall, the recent decline of traditional media is remarkable.

Some conservative writers insist that mainstream media’s failure is due to its liberal bias. But conservatives have charged that for decades — to no effect. Another charge is that TV is declining because it is increasingly gross or trivial. True enough, but TV’s popularity was unaffected for decades by its experiments with edgy taste.

Let’s look more closely at the structure of the system to better understand current steep declines. Due to the low cost of modern media technology, no clear distinction now exists between a mainstream medium and a non-mainstream one, based on either number of viewers or production cost. Today, anyone can put up a video at YouTube at virtually no cost. Popular videos get hundreds of thousands of views. Podcasting and videocasting are also cheap. A blog can be started for free, within minutes, at Blogger. It may get 10 viewers or 10,000, depending on the level of popular interest. But the viewers control that, not the providers.

The key change is that the traditional media professional is no longer a gatekeeper who can systematically admit or deny information. Consumers program their own print, TV, or radio, and download what they want to their personal devices. They are their own editors, their own filmmakers, their own disc jockeys.

Does that mean more bias or less? It’s hard to say, given that consumers now manage their own level of bias. So they can hear much more biased news — or much less. And, as Podcasting News observes, “Social media is a global phenomenon happening in all markets regardless of wider economic, social and cultural development.”

Understandably, traditional media professionals, alarmed by these developments, have constructed a doctrine of “localism” and, in some cases, called for government to bail them out. That probably won’t help, just as it wouldn’t have helped if the media professionals had called for a government “bailed out” of newspapers when they were threatened by radio, or of radio when it was threatened by TV. Video really did (sort of) kill the radio star, but the radio star certainly won’t be revived by government grants.

Still, the news is not all bad. Yes, new media do sometimes kill old media. For example, no one seriously uses pigeon post to send messages today. But few ever thought birdmail was a great system, just the only one available at the time. However, radio did not kill print, and TV did not kill radio. Nor will the Internet kill older media; it will simply change news delivery. Sometimes in a minor way, but sometimes radically.

Media that work, whether radio, TV, newspapers, books, blogs, or any other, thrive when there is a true need. Today’s challenge is to persuade the consumer to look at alternatives to their own programming decisions.

Denyse O’Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

The original news article can be viewed at:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/decline_of_traditional_media/

Article from MercatorNet.com

SAUDI ARABIA: PASTOR FLEES DEATH THREATS

Religious police, others warn key figure in expatriate church to leave.

LOS ANGELES, January 30 (Compass Direct News) – A prominent foreign pastor in Saudi Arabia has fled Riyadh after a member of the mutawwa’in, or religious police, and others threatened him three times in one week.

Two of the incidents included threats to kill house church pastor Yemane Gebriel of Eritrea. On Wednesday (Jan. 28), Gebriel escaped to an undisclosed city in Saudi Arabia.

A father of eight who has lived and worked as a private driver in Saudi Arabia for 25 years, Gebriel told Compass that on Jan. 10 he found an unsigned note on his vehicle threatening to kill him if he did not leave the country. On Jan. 13, he said, mutawwa’in member Abdul Aziz and others forced him from his van and told him to leave the country.

“There was a note on my van saying, ‘If you do not leave the country, we will kill you,” Gebriel told Compass by telephone. “Three days after that, [Aziz] said, ‘You’re still working here, why don’t you go out of the country?”

Aziz, another member of the mutawwa’in and a policeman had waited for Gebriel shortly after 9 p.m. A sheikh at a Riyadh mosque, Aziz raged at Gebriel for about five minutes, accusing him of being a Christian and trying to change the religion of others, said a Christian source in Saudi Arabia.

“He finished by telling Yemane to get out of the country or ‘measures’ would be taken,” said the source, who requested anonymity for security reasons. He said Gebriel was in genuine danger of losing his life. “In meeting with me on the morning of Thursday, Jan. 15, Yemane himself was clearly very frightened,” said the source.

That night (Jan. 15), Gebriel told Compass, four masked men – apparently Saudis – in a small car cut off the van he was driving. “They said, ‘We will kill you if you don’t go away from this place – you must leave here or we will kill you,’” he said.

Gebriel subsequently took temporary refuge in a safe house in Riyadh, and after consulting with consular officials from four embassies on Tuesday (Jan. 27), the pastor was whisked away to another city the following day.

In 2005, the religious police’s Aziz had directed that Gebriel be arrested along with 16 other foreign Christian leaders, though diplomatic pressure resulted in their release within weeks.

“No doubt Sheikh Abdul Aziz is still burning,” said the local Christian source. “Nor may such type of death threat be possibly idle words. The current situation and circumstance remind me very much of the machine-gun murder of Irish Roman Catholic layman Tony Higgins right here in Riyadh in August 2004.”

 

Raids Feared

Gebriel, 42, led a church of more than 300 foreign-born Christians, though because of work obligations only a little over 150 are able to meet regularly in his villa for Friday worship. He fled without his family, as his wife and children had managed to relocate in Egypt in August 2007.

Gebriel and three others started the house church in Riyadh 10 years ago, the local source said, and only a few months ago the pastor handed leadership over to others in the church.

“But right now the entire church is very frightened,” the source said. “They are expecting a raid one Friday shortly – just like in 2005. The congregation doesn’t even know yet that we have whisked Yemane away from them as well as from the religious police.”

In April and May of 2005, the mutawwa’in arrested 17 pastors – two Pakistanis, two Eritreans (including Gebriel), three Ethiopians and 10 Indians. None were deported after their release.

“Are there signs that 2009 might prove to be such a year again? I think so,” the source said. “Every three or four years, there is a clamp-down in Riyadh. It seems that we should expect 2009 to be a year of repression. However, the underground church here is far better placed than heretofore to manage any such persecution.”

The Saudi regime has reportedly begun to restrain the mutawwa’in, which historically has acted as a virtual vigilante force enforcing the kingdom’s Sunni Islamic social codes as volunteer agents of the semi-autonomous Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice. The U.S. Department of State’s 2008 International Religious Freedom Report noted that abuses by mutawwa’in have continued.

“Mutawwa’in (religious police) continued to conduct raids of private non-Muslim religious gatherings,” the report states. “There were also charges of harassment, abuse, and killings at the hands of the mutawwa’in, or religious police. These incidents caused many non-Muslims to worship in fear of, and in such a manner as to avoid discovery by, the police and mutawwa’in.”

In the past year, mutawwa’in sometimes have not respected the Saudi policy of allowing private worship for all, including non-Muslims, according to the report. Religious police are not allowed to mete out punishment, but in the past year the Saudi government has investigated several incidents in which the mutawwa’in were accused of violating restrictions on that and other activities, according to the state department report.

The mutawwa’in still wear no uniforms, but the report notes that they are now required to wear identification badges and can act only when accompanied by police. They are authorized to monitor the practice of non-Muslim faiths, display or sale of pornography, alcohol production, distribution or consumption, and adultery, homosexuality and gambling, among other violations.

While Saudi law forbids public practice of any religion besides Islam, foreigners are generally allowed to worship privately if their congregations do not grow too large.

With the Quran and sayings of Muhammad (Sunna) as its constitution, Saudi Arabia enforces a form of sharia (Islamic law) derived from 18th-century Sunni scholar Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab that calls for the death penalty for “apostasy,” or conversion from Islam to another faith, although the state department’s report notes that there have been no confirmed reports of executions for apostasy in recent years.

Saudi Arabia’s ruling monarchy restricts media and other forms of public expression, though recently authorities have tolerated criticism of the mutawwa’in and the Commission to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice.

“The government-controlled press frequently criticized mutawwa’in activity,” the report adds.  

Report from Compass Direct News