The Gatekeeper
Everybody under the sun knows Bill Gates. The founder of Microsoft is the fourth richest man in the world and is also arguably the single most important individual in global public health policy, having developed a second career as the de facto world tsar of public health. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a leading force in infectious disease and vaccine distribution fields and also one of the top voluntary contributors to the WHO.
There is no doubt that Gates’ philanthropy has helped millions if not hundreds of thousands of people. However, his unwillingness to share vaccine recipes is profoundly harmful to lives in the Global South.
Right now, over a 100 countries have yet to administer a single dose of a vaccine while about ¾ of all vaccines doses administered have been in the top 10 countries with the highest-incomes.
In a recent interview with Sky News, he commented:
"Well, there's only so many vaccine factories in the world and people are very serious about the safety of vaccines. And so moving something that had never been done — moving a vaccine, say, from a [Johnson & Johnson] factory into a factory in India — it's novel — it's only because of our grants and expertise that that can happen at all. The thing that's holding "things back" in terms of the global vaccine rollout, continued Gates, "is not intellectual property. It's not like there's some idle vaccine factory, with regulatory approval, that makes magically safe vaccines. You know, you've got to do the trial on these things. Every manufacturing process needs to be looked at in a very careful way.”
However, journalist Alexander Zaitchik, claims that this just ain’t so.
Associated Press also reports that:
India, in particular, is experiencing the explosion of Covid case-fatalities after the country endured draconian lockdowns last year. The US just recently lifted an embargo on the raw materials needed to make vaccines in India and improve their vaccination rates.
And Biolyse, a small pharmaceutical manufacturer in Canada asserts that:
Those advocating for a resolution to temporarily lift patent protections at the WTO also issued scathing indictments of Gates' defense of the status quo.
It was also reported by Kaiser Health News back in August 2020 that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation had urged Oxford to reverse course from its commitment “to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any drugmaker.” Instead, “[Oxford] signed an exclusive deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices—with the less-publicized potential for Oxford to eventually make millions from the deal and win plenty of prestige.”
Instead of sharing vaccine know-how, Bill Gates has advocated for the WHO’s COVAX scheme, which depends on donations from rich countries to help fund the cost of vaccine distribution in the Global South. He is framing this issue as though pursuing COVAX and lifting patent protections are binary or mutually exclusive options. The fact is that the COVAX scheme does not fix the supply/access problem currently facing low-income countries. The WHO initiative set a goal to provide 2 billion doses (which is still insufficient) and has provided 38 million doses only so far. Gates’ suggestion that we stay the course with current levels of vaccine production and not take further action is not how [the world] can avoid the horror of watching the virus mutate to the point where it jumps the current vaccines” as progressive political commentator Krystal Ball puts it.
While Gates is one of the more favorably viewed billionaires (a recent poll by the Data For Progress showed Bill Gates had a 71% favorability rating among Democrats and a 39% rating among Republicans), those who have closely tracked his involvement in public health will not be surprised by his recent comments.
Ball contends:
“Since Gates got involved in the AIDS epidemic in Africa in the 90s, he has cultivated close relationships with Big Pharma execs, lauded their wonderful and noble efforts, and aggressively pushed for industry friendly policies with regards to patents. This significantly set back access to AIDS retroviral therapies and it has been a disaster for COVID vaccine access. Gate’s pro industry stance also should come as no surprise given that the man is a billionaire uber capitalist who made his ill-gotten fortune by novel exploitations of patent law and unchecked monopoly power. [Government is often complicit in crony capitalist practices such as protecting Big Pharma monopolies]. Now he may sincerely want to cure disease and make the world a better place but he also has a sincere ideological commitment to protecting monopolies and profit margins for some of the world’s worst actors and he doesn’t seem to care what the consequences are.”
Albeit there is also a larger discussion to be had on intellectual property theft by China and Russia, this pandemic is an instance where profit-making has to take a back seat.
While Gates and other proponents for Big Pharma argue that patents help foster innovation, which creates life-saving therapies that the public benefits from, it is important to note that every new drug developed in the US in the past 10 years was funded by US taxpayers. The groundbreaking mRNA technology was indeed developed by university researchers and scientists at the National Institutes of Health and Department of Defense. Big Pharma simply has no business monopolizing and reaping profits off of a good the public created. These patent protections are placed so that generic versions of life-saving vaccines cannot be manufactured to increase supply and lower costs.
Jennifer Holdsworth Karp, Democratic Strategist stresses: “Now, if Bill Gates was true to his mission, … then he would absolutely be at the forefront of making sure every factory would be operating at full capacity.”
Rachel Bovard, Senior Policy Director at the Conservative Partnership Institute, also points out that this is a classic case of billionaire exceptionalism: “if you’ve made money in one sector and invented a really good product, somehow it means you’re good at everything and we should defer our government policy to your judgement.”
The bottom line is “we should not privatize our public health decisions in the Microsoft Office” as Bovard argues. No one voted for Bill Gates and he is unaccountable to the people his decisions affect. She also notes “it has always been the American way that once we are set, we share with others.”
Sources used:
https://apnews.com/article/drug-companies-called-share-vaccine-info-22d92afbc3ea9ed519be007f8887bcf6
https://newrepublic.com/article/162000/bill-gates-impeded-global-access-covid-vaccines
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4zf9nicSTA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVsvJEwNRBo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ5DavuOkcM
https://khn.org/news/rather-than-give-away-its-covid-vaccine-oxford-makes-a-deal-with-drugmaker/
