EU pushes back on Biden plan to waive coronavirus
vaccine patents
Leaders point finger at US and UK as geopolitical
contest heats up.
European leaders have been on the defensive since
Biden’s announcement, which they view as a shrewd
BY DAVID M.
HERSZENHORN, RYM MOMTAZ AND HANS VON DER BURCHARD
May 8, 2021
1:11 pm
PORTO,
Portugal — EU leaders have a question for the President of the United States
about waiving vaccine patents: So, how exactly is this going to go, Joe?
Joe Biden
may have initially set Europe on its heels with his surprise proposal to
suspend intellectual property rights, but at a European Council summit in
Porto, Portugal, top EU officials pushed back hard, saying Washington has not
put forward a specific plan and that, in the near term, waiving patents would
not help with the immediate, urgent need to increase production in poorer
countries.
“On the
intellectual property, we don’t think in the short term that it’s the magic
bullet but we are ready to engage on this topic as soon as a concrete proposal
will be put on the table,” European Council President Charles Michel said
Saturday morning, summarizing a roughly three-hour dinner discussion among
leaders on Friday night about the pandemic.
French
President Emmanuel Macron was even more pointed in calling on the U.S. and the
U.K. first to take more important steps: ending de facto bans on vaccine
exports; sharing technology needed to ramp up production; and donating existing
doses.
"The
Anglo-Saxons must first stop their export bans," Macron said, in reference
to the U.S. and the U.K., and he pointedly accused Washington's policies of
obstructing some companies from manufacturing doses. "I am calling very
clearly on the U.S. to end their export ban of vaccines and components that
prevent production," he said. "CureVac says it can't produce in
Europe because components are blocked in the U.S. … So lift the export ban —
lift it, on the ingredients and the vaccines. And, secondly, liberate the
doses."
Waiving
patents, the French president said, should be fourth on the list of priorities.
“If we want to work quickly, today there isn’t one factory in the world that
can’t produce doses for poor countries because of intellectual property,”
Macron said, arriving for the Saturday session of the summit. “The priority
today is not intellectual property — it’s not true. We would be lying to
ourselves. It’s production.”
Companies
that want to produce vaccines using a waiver acknowledge that a change in
intellectual property rules would not mean they could instantly start churning
out doses. But they say it would be a key step in allowing more manufacturers
to make the vaccines. Some EU leaders, however, said such a move would punish
the companies that developed the inoculations that stand to save many millions
of lives.
"I
don’t believe that the waiver of patents is a solution to provide vaccines for
more people,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who participated in the
summit by videolink. “Instead, I believe that we need the creativity and
innovative force of companies, and for me, this includes patent protection.”
Aiding
China not Africa
During the
leaders' dinner on Friday night, Merkel warned her colleagues that a patent
waiver could do more to benefit a geopolitical rival like China, which has production
capacity to make use of new Western mRNA technology, than it would to help
needy countries in Africa obtain vaccines. “For me, the issue of patent
protection is not the path that will lead us to more vaccines and better
vaccines," Merkel said during her post-summit news conference in Berlin.
The
criticism of Biden marked an escalation in the contest for supremacy in vaccine
diplomacy — a geopolitical battle in which China, Russia and the U.K. are also
fully engaged. And it came just as EU heads of state and government were
readying for a videoconference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a
vocal advocate of waiving patent protections whose country has faced a
devastating surge in infections.
European
leaders have been on the defensive since Biden’s announcement, which they view
as a shrewd — and somewhat maddening— public relations maneuver.
Although EU
leaders had announced urgent plans to help India, Biden upstaged Europe, first
by announcing donations to India of millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine
and then by reversing course and endorsing a patent waiver. India is a
pharmaceutical manufacturing powerhouse and perhaps the country best positioned
to capitalize on Biden’s plan.
But the
competition for influence extends beyond India. At a Friday night news
conference in Porto, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen noted
that the EU was already activating plans to send more than 600,000 doses to
countries in the Western Balkans and was planning similar donations for
countries in the Eastern Partnership group that spans Eastern Europe and the
Caucasus.
That group
includes Ukraine, which has pleaded with Washington for vaccine help — to no
avail, and where Secretary of State Antony Blinken paid a visit just this week.
'Pharmacy
of the world'
In chiding
the U.S. leader for a lack of specifics, von der Leyen and other EU leaders repeatedly
stressed that among democracies, only countries within the EU’s single market
have been exporting "large-scale" quantities of vaccines.
Asked about
the patent issue, von der Leyen said: “We should be open to this discussion,
but when we lead this discussion there needs to be a 360-degree view on it,
because we need vaccines now for the whole world. And in the short and medium
term, the IP waiver will not solve the problems, will not bring a single dose
of vaccine in the short and medium term.”
At the
summit's closing news conference, von der Leyen said: "The European Union
is the pharmacy of the world and open to the world. Up to today in the European
Union, 400 million doses of vaccines have been produced and 50 percent of them
— 200 million doses — have been exported to 90 different countries in the
world. So we invite others to do the same. This is the best way right now in
the short term to approach the bottlenecks and the lack of vaccines
worldwide."
Belgian
Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said EU leaders did not need any lectures from
Washington: "As Europeans, we don’t need to be schooled. The U.S. hasn’t
exported a single vaccine in the past six months. Europe is the one that’s been
producing for itself and the rest of the world these past six months.”
Travel
certificates get moving
With the
pace of vaccinations accelerating, many EU countries with big tourism sectors
are eager to reopen to summer travelers and von der Leyen told leaders at the
summit that plans for an EU-authorized "travel certificate" were
moving forward.
"The
legal and the technical work on the EU travel certificate, the vaccination
certificate, is on track for the system to be operational in June," she
said, noting perhaps ambitiously, that a deal between the Council of the EU and
the European Parliament could be reached this month.
She said
the scheme would allow people to "carry with them unfalsifiable proof that
they have been vaccinated or they have a negative mutually recognized test, or
they have overcome COVID and thus antibodies."
EU
countries have struggled to remain united with regard to border control
measures and some countries, including Greece and Croatia, have already
announced plans to reopen to U.S. tourists, for example, even as the Commission
is working to develop new joint recommendations.
In Porto,
Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković told POLITICO that his country was
pushing to reassure tourists that it was safe to visit, and also hoped the EU
travel certificates would be approved soon.
"Our
objective is to create conditions that we can have again a tourist season at
least at the level or even better than it was last year," said Plenković,
whose economy relies heavily on tourism.
He said
Croatia would "do our utmost to speed up the vaccination of our citizens
to ensure that every single tourist that comes to Croatia feels safe"
while also pushing for the adoption of the EU green certificate.
Several
countries, such as Austria, have taken matters into their own hands with the
launch of a national pass. If there's no EU-wide agreement, countries could cut
bilateral deals, Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz said. He said even
countries that had concerns about the scheme were under pressure to restart
travel.
"There
aren't just politicians in the world, thank God, there's the population, and
the population ... is impatient: People want to travel again, they want to have
the possibility of going on holiday again," he said.
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