Omicron Scotland: Tory incompetence is tying our hands in the fight against Covid

The latest variant is worryingly transmissible, where the sheer number of cases means that thousands will be needing hospital treatment. The Scottish Government and other devolved nations are doing what they can to protect our citizens, but its hands are tied by the incompetence of this Tory government.

Questions are rightly being asked as to how this happened. Why did Boris dither and delay on rolling out the booster vaccine? Why, when the Omicron and Delta variants emerged earlier this year, did it take so long to put countries where they had spread to on the red list? Could the emergence of these variants have been avoided?

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The last question is no mere hypothetical. It is surely no coincidence that Delta and Omicron emerged in countries with which have far lower vaccination rates than the richer, developed nations of the world. In the UK, 70% of people have been fully vaccinated, with 38% having received their booster dose. In India and South Africa, the figures are 39% and 27% respectively.

These figures are par for the course in the developing world. In Nigeria, the largest country on the African continent, it stands at 2%. In Papua New Guinea, 2.5%. In Afghanistan it is less than 10%. In Africa as a whole only 12.1% of the population have received at least one dose of a vaccine. Of all the vaccine doses dispensed this year less than 1% went to low-income countries.

Why are the numbers so low? Is it incompetence, vaccine skepticism or something else? The answer, as with so many of the world’s problems, lies in inequality. The vaccines exist, the factories are there to produce them, yet due to intellectual property laws the cost is prohibitive. And so, people die when they might have lived.

In a touch of irony, South Africa and India earlier this year submitted a proposal to the World Trade Organization for a temporary waiver on all Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) in regard to Covid-19 vaccines and medical supplies. TRIPS has its merits and purposes in enabling creators to receive the profit from their inventions. Yet it has proven a stumbling bloc for the developing world in accessing Covid vaccines.

There is a strong case for the TRIPS waiver. Existing solutions to the inequity of vaccine distribution have not worked.

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The Covax scheme was set up to ensure equitable access to Covid vaccines, yet by October 2020, G20 member states had received 15 times more Covid-19 vaccine doses per capita than sub-Saharan African countries. The Covid-19 Technology Access Pool was supposed to be a voluntary sharing and pooling of Covid-19 resources and data. However, it is largely ignored by pharmaceutical corporations.

All the while, rich countries have been buying and stockpiling vaccines leading to massive waste. The US wasted 180,000 doses by the end of March. In August, the UK threw away 600,000 AstraZeneca doses after they had expired. Vaccine nationalism is costing lives and money, with the RAND Corporation estimating that it will cost the global economy as much as $1.2 trillion a year in GDP terms.

It’s not that developing countries lack the means to produce vaccines. In a recent study by Human Rights Watch, the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Access Campaign and AccessIBSA, they identified at least 120 companies in Africa, Asia and Latin America with the potential to produce Covid vaccines. However, the failure of pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge freely means that others cannot produce the vaccines and medical equipment needed to save lives.

To add insult to injury, the vast amounts of research and work that has gone into developing Covid vaccines would not have been possible without large amounts of public funding. The US poured approximately $2.3 billion into research and development. Germany invested slightly more than $1.5bn. Of the $5.9bn in investment tracked up to March 2021, 98.12% came from public funding.

Despite this substantial public investment, the pharmaceutical companies are making a huge profit. MSF highlighted in a report in October that BioNTech-Pfizer and Moderna estimate they will earn $26bn and $19.2bn respectively in sales from Covid-19 vaccines in 2021. Both have already acquired $60bn in sales of the shots just for 2021 and 2022 alone. The public is paying the cost, but the companies are raking the profits.

It is for these reasons and more that a waiver on TRIPS for Covid-19 vaccines and medical supplies is necessary. Such a waiver would remove the most significant obstacle for developing countries to produce their own vaccines and medical supplies.

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This will lead to more lives being saved and a faster rate of global vaccination. The proposal made by South Africa and India now has the backing of more than 100 countries, including the likes of France, the US and Australia. The UK is one of the few holding it back.

When we have pressed the Tories on this issue, they claim they have “not seen evidence that Intellectual Property is a barrier to the production or supply of Covid-19 goods, including vaccines”. They wave a wand and pretend that voluntary licensing and technology transfers are working, that the system isn’t broken or stacked against the developing world.

The emergence of Omicron would suggest that this is not the case. As has so often been said, no-one is safe until everyone is safe. The tragedy of the Delta and Omicron variants were not that they were inevitable but they were preventable.

It is time the UK wakes up to the reality that its obstinance on TRIPS is costing lives as well as resources. The sooner we see global solidarity in action, the sooner we can stop Covid.