One year after the global explosion of the Covid-19 pandemic, the European Union is still one step behind. Through the Commission, it has certainly pre-ordered, since last summer, more doses – 2.6 billion in total from 8 multinational pharmaceutical companies – than all the other Western players, thereby participating in a deadly competition that deprives the rest of the world of access to vaccines.
At the top of the podium to virtually confiscate the vials, she failed, failing to obtain them concretely, to keep pace. At the end of February, the EU countries remained very far behind Israel, the United Kingdom or the United States in their vaccination campaigns.
London 1 – Brussels 0
The reasons for these disparities are undoubtedly different: when Tel Aviv pays its doses of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine at a high price – around 45 euros per injection, three times more than the highest price elsewhere – and that Washington keeps the upper hand over serums largely financed by the American administration, London relies on urgent approvals by its regulatory authority of the drug, which, for the vaccine “general public” of Oxford-AstraZeneca as for the others , give it at least a month ahead of Brussels.
In this landscape of desolation for the European Union, one element overdetermines the fiasco: it is the production chains, very fragile on the continent, which make it appear as a second zone. In recent weeks, especially since the end of January, with the sudden breaks in deliveries to Member States unilaterally announced by Pfizer and AstraZeneca, the Commission has been trying to meet the challenge of manufacturing for Europe and, according to speeches, for the planet whole. But, in practice, it risks, here too, to miss the point.
American “model”
For the time being, Brussels is mimicking the model of the United States and is launching an “incubator” in a new “bio-defense” department called Hera (acronym for Health Emergency Response Authority) and directly modeled on the American federal agency Barda, through which Washington has largely funded and organized the research, development, clinical trials, production and distribution of various vaccines. While Joe Biden, upon his arrival at the White House, chose to resort to legislative provisions dating back to the Korean War – the Defense Production Act – and allowing the State to have stronger control in sectors considered as strategic, the European Commission basically keeps only the promise of “public-private partnerships” with the pharmaceutical industry.
According to the diagram drawn by Ursula von der Leyen, it is a question of “bringing together all the resources”, whether they emanate from researchers, industrialists or regulators. All this – it should be noted – without trying so far to produce in Europe the Russian vaccine Sputnik V, effective at more than 90%, according to a study published in a British scientific journal, which the President of the Commission rejected, the February 17, with a poisonous hint: “Globally, we still wonder why Russia is theoretically proposing millions and millions of doses, without making enough progress in vaccinating its own population. “
16 possible sites in France
European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Industry, Thierry Breton illustrates quite well the magical thinking at work in Brussels. According to him, it was enough for him to visit the factory of the subcontractor of AstraZeneca, in Seneffe (Belgium), responsible for producing the stocks of sera intended for the countries of the EU, for the difficulties to be resolved and for the production volume suddenly goes up. More fundamentally, based on the example of Sanofi, which clears a production line in a German factory for Pfizer-BioNTech serum, the Frenchman lists 16 industrial sites that would be able to manufacture the active substances of the vaccine, regardless of or its base (messenger RNA, adenovirus, inactivated virus, etc.), and an identical number of potential plants for finishing and packaging. Thierry Breton takes up the big arguments of Big Pharma in defense of multinational monopolies: “Producing vaccines from scratch is no small task, it can last between four and five years,” he pleads. he. Our strategy is to start from what already exists, with the industrial base in Europe. We support companies so that they can increase their production capacities. “
In reality, the increase in production is probably not as unthinkable as the Commission claims. According to a review carried out by the American NGO Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), specialized in the fight against the abuse of intellectual property, the time required between the transfer of technologies from multinationals and the start of production on the chains of manufacture of the various vaccines by their subcontractors takes between one and three months, on average. This shows to what extent the EU misses its target, by refusing to attack the pharmaceutical patent regime and by inevitably prolonging an artificial scarcity, exploited by the monopolies for their greater profit.
On this crucial theme in the pandemic, despite the threats posed by the new variants or even the out-of-stock items for essential elements – such as lipids, vials or needles – Ursula von der Leyen is taking a very small step forward. In addition to its “Hera incubator”, it proposes to set up a voluntary pooling center for licenses, technologies and know-how. However, it limits it to the EU alone, while the World Health Organization (WHO) has been advocating, since April 2020, to establish such an instrument on a planetary scale. All this remains, of course, at the goodwill of the bosses of the large pharmaceutical companies. In the “Financial Times” at the end of February, Emmanuel Macron calls them, somewhat reluctantly, to seize the pole: “If vaccine producers do not want to play the game of cooperation, the political question of intellectual property will inevitably rise. in all our countries. “
source https://pledgetimes.com/anti-covid-vaccines-faced-with-big-pharma-europe-plays-little-arm/
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