New Delhi, Aug 4,2021: The gap between the emphasis placed on Intellectual Property Rights by the pharma industry and the meeting of public health goals in the time of Covid-19 will only delay the elimination of the pandemic by several years, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Tuesday, terming it “simply not acceptable”.
Addressing the inaugural session of the BRICS Academic Forum, Jaishankar said that that beyond the health aspect there is a larger economic lesson for the world to learn from the pandemic, and that is the need to create more reliable and resilient supply chains to infuse greater confidence in the global economy and to de-risk it from future pandemics.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for a human-centric globalisation was not just a recognition of pandemic-induced distortions, but in fact of broader inequities. Welfare and well-being of people, families and communities cannot be divorced from the global reset and resilience that is occurring in the long tail of Covid-19,” he said in his address to the Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) Academic Forum in the runup to the leaders summit later.
“A case in point is the imbalance between the emphasis on IPR in the pharmaceutical industry and the meeting of public health goals. Left untouched, the current practices will only delay the elimination of the pandemic by several years. This is simply not acceptable,” he said.
His reference was to the large-scale objection raised by pharma majors to the request by India and South Africa to the World Trade Organization to waive Intellectual Property Rights for Covid-19 vaccines, treatments, diagnostics and technology.
The Biden administration in May this year announced that it would support a temporary waiver of IP provisions in the hope it would allow developing nations to produce their own Covid vaccines developed by pharmaceutical companies.
Under WTO rules, the organisation can invoke a waiver of certain IP rights on technologies that could help combat an exceptional global crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. India and South Africa had on October 16 last year presented a proposal to the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Council to allow its members to waive four categories of IP rights – copyright, industrial designs, patents and undisclosed information – under the Agreement of TRIPS until the majority of the world population receives effective vaccines and develops immunity to Covid-19.
Jaishankar, in his address, called for diversification of investments “to provide a certain assurance of sustainability – for livelihoods, for families and communities, and of course for the natural environment”.
He said that the past years “has made more of us alive to the limitations of an economic model that posits efficiency and pricing as antithetical to people and community or indeed to livelihoods and sustainability”.
He said emerging technologies, especially digital technology and the Internet, while they can become an instrument for sources of extremism and motivated misinformation, have proved invaluable for India in pushing back the pandemic.
“In the year-and-a-half of living and coping with the Covid-19, they have accelerated contact tracing, vaccine delivery, online and mobile-based diagnosis; and targeted delivery of welfare. India’s 800/400 accomplishment i.e. food rations for 800 million people and cash transfers to 400 million – has been streamlined by digitally-enabled technology. The surge in online education has also been noteworthy,” he said.
He said while the pandemic has “demanded a price in terms of economic growth and has challenged SDG timelines”, technology could “help us now recover ground and time”.
“India is optimistic on this score, and ready to share what it has harnessed, innovated and learnt in these last years,” Jaishankar said.
Stating that “BRICS is a statement of global rebalancing that underlines its essential diversity and pluralism”, Jaishankar said that “updating and recalibration of the post-World War II multilateral architecture cannot be postponed any further”.
“The pandemic and the normative breakdown in its wake have rudely reminded us that institutions built to tackle problems of the 1940s desperately need to be upgraded and made fit-for-purpose for our century.”
“An expansion of the permanent membership of the Security Council is a necessary ingredient. But by itself it is not sufficient. Multilateral institutions have been disadvantaged by structural inertia, competitive gridlocks, uneven resourcing and skewed navigation. The proliferation of new and smaller platforms, including of plurilateral and regional groups, is therefore a response to such felt gaps. BRICS itself was actually among the earliest in this regard. Too often, we obsess with one or the other response; more effort and action is actually required to fill the gaps,” he said.
He said that “Terrorism thrives in some of these gaps. Its nursery lies in conflict-ridden spaces made fertile for radicalisation by malign players, including states. The transition in Afghanistan that we are seeing today and the warfare that has yet again been forced upon its people has sharpened this challenge. Left unattended, its edge will be deeply felt not just in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood but well beyond.
“We are therefore all stakeholders in the quest for a clear, coordinated and undifferentiated response to terrorism. In the 21st century, legitimacy cannot be derived from mass violence, brutal intimidation or covert agendas. Representation, inclusion, peace and stability are inextricably linked,” he stated.
