Glad to share another short piece on the TRIPS waiver discussion, originally published in the Blog of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung’s (RLS) Geneva office  in April 2022 . Unfortunately this piece has not aged well, as the outcome of the mobilization spear-headed by India and South Africa and shouldered and pushed forward by a wide coalition of civil society groups did not achieve (by far) the desired goals.

Breaking the cycle of profits and patents in a pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which brought in its wake so much heartache and turmoil, did not happen in a vacuum, but within already established structures of social inequity and patterns of political imbalance. The development and subsequent procurement of vaccines followed—and continues to follow—a trend whereby the wealthy were the first to access medical technologies, while the rest were forced to wait and hope for the best. A profit-driven biomedical research and development model and the important role that intellectual property (IP) plays in the business strategies of large, transnational pharmaceutical companies were also strong winds for the perfect storm.

Solidarity is never as close and necessary to survival as when a threat, like a pandemic, makes no distinction between border or wealth, and no country would escape unscathed. The response from the international community veered from the hefty words in the early days of the pandemic proclaiming vaccines to be global public goods, to the ensuing confusing multiplication of initiatives with lofty ambitions of global distribution of vaccines. Finally, we settled on the realization that, for the European Union and other pharma-friendly governments, even in such unprecedented times, it would be business as usual when it comes to IP and access to health technologies.

A pandemic response lacking moral leadership.

 Post originally published in Health Action International (HAI) page in March 2021

 

In October 2020, eight months after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic, India and South Africa submitted a proposal for a temporary waiver on certain articles of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) TRIPS Agreement. This so-called TRIPS waiver would cover patents, industrial designs and copyright among other Intellectual Property (IP) protection elements of COVID-19-related health technologies, including vaccines

Support for the TRIPS waiver has extended through the Global South while wealthier countries remain fiercely opposed to even discussing the merits of the proposal. Source

Rich countries must join the world in supporting the TRIPS waiver to end the pandemic People´s Health Movement.

The idea has since been welcomed and supported by many governments at WTO (57 are now co-sponsors), civil society from across the world, and other stakeholders, such as researchers and economists. Yet it has been met with a mixture of incredulity and hostility from pharma and a small group of countries, who have spared no effort to stifle any debate on the merits of the proposal.

Public Health and Diplomacy. Wikileaks lays bare US priorities.

More on the wikileaks saga. Good piece by Knowledge Ecology International relayed through IP-Health ( Vol 16, Issue 18 ) on the latest cables to be made public, regarding data exclusivity, one amongst several chief  features of TRIPS + like rules with serious implications for Public Health. Meanwhile, Bradley  Manning remains in jail, in harsh conditions. We shall not forget.

Source Imaginechina/Corbis in WikiLeaks' free trade documents reveal 'drastic' Australian concessions The Guardian 7th October 2014

240 Wikileaks cables on pharmaceutical data exclusivity

The following are the cables identified in an August 29, 2011 search of the wikileaks cables,  using the search terms data exclusivity and pharmaceutical. This search identified 240 cables. Some 40 countries are mentioned in the cables. More than half of the cables involve 5 countries: Turkey (76), Taiwan (21), El Salvador (11), Honduras (11) and Tunisia (10).

Corporate Self-Interest And Strategic Choices: Gilead Licenses To Medicines Patent Pool

Intellectual Property rights and Public Health constitute two increasingly overlapping areas, most specially since 1994 with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) based upon a diverse set of international treaties regulating different aspects of trade and commerce, among them the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), which for the first time aims to establish a global common ground on regulating (through such instruments as patents) production, trade and stockpiling of pharmaceutical products.  Its implications in terms of access are a matter for concern, and a legitimate human rights issue which we will be following closely. 

Unfair trade is one of the driving forces behind entrenched poverty and widening health disparities.Trade policies impact health through their effects on the social determinants of health as shown in this chart prepared by the Economic Governance for Health

In this occasion we would like to highlight a good piece by Northeastern University School of Law professor (affiliate to its Program on Human Rights and the Global Economy)  and Health Gap Policy Analyst (Global Access Project) Brook K. Baker in IP-Watch on recent developments in the IP and Public Health area, most specially the recent licensing agreement between Gilead and the Patent Pool for medicines.  

Information shall be freed. Aaron Swartz and the Guerrilla Open access manifesto

 Access to knowledge is an essential part of  an informed citizenry, critical for a full-fledged democracy; obstacles and constraints of different nature to this access is one of the many factors feeding the digital divide, which in the age of the information keeps inequality painfully updated. 

Several recent developments have shown that those with the power and means to profit the most from the private use of information and knowledge are not  willing to relinquish this privilege.

Heavy Downloader, Aaron Swarts, co-founder of Demand Progress indicted by US authorities on July 19th accused of downloading thousands of academic papers and making them available to a wider audience Picture from Wikipedia

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Furthermore they are taking very specific steps to ensure that no one dares to suggest they should.
On  one hand and following some successful hits by the Anonymous Hacker collective in solidarity with Wikileaks,  , the US Justice Department announced  on July 20th the arrest of 16 individuals (with 5 people held in European territories) and search raids in 35 locations in connection to the referred actions of solidarity. On the other hand, NYT and other corporate media outlets informed of the arrest on June 19th  of Aaron Swartz, a Harvard researcher known for his contribution to the development of the RSS tool and his stance in favor of open access. Mr Swartz presumably accessed a protected server at MIT  to download a huge number of academic papers and files from JSTOR  which he later purportedly uploaded in a file-sharing site (with another upload of massive academic information having been reported  recently in apparent solidarity with Mr. Swartz).  Finally, is worthy noting (and it will be developed in this very pages) that US, EU and other major western countries have been negotiating (behind closed doors) a new international treaty to counter "piracy", the so called Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement (ACTA) agreement is yet a new attempt by industrialized States (and their corporate backers) to uplift Intellectual Property standards in a way that it will be more difficult to access and share knowledge.
Here you can find the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto that Mr. Swartz authored some time ago:

Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You’ll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.

There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost. 

That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and unacceptable.

“I agree,” many say, “but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it’s perfectly legal — there’s nothing we can do to stop them.” But there is something we can, something that’s already being done: we can fight back. 

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends. 

Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your friends.

But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.

Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which they operate require it — their shareholders would revolt at anything less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies. 

There is no justice in following unjust laws. It’s time to come into the light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our opposition to this private theft of public culture. 

We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.

With enough of us, around the world, we’ll not just send a strong message opposing the privatization of knowledge — we’ll make it a thing of the past. Will you join us?

 Aaron Swartz July 2008, Eremo, Italy

Here you can show your support for Mr Swartz in this trying moments.

More on the issue

• A close look at the Stop Online Piracy Act bill  Jonathan Zittrain Al Jazeera English January 12 
•  Academic publishers have become the enemies of science Mike Taylor The Guardian January 12