Covid Vaccines: Big Pharma boomerangs against the EU – VoxEurop

To save as many lives as possible, while ensuring pharmaceutical companies secure profits from the race for the vaccine: this is the EU’s “Mission Impossible”, faced with a human catastrophe that has already taken more than 2.5 million victims.

European leaders know the priority is to protect lives, including those of the potentially infected, and those who lose their livelihood due to lockdowns. Yet they dare not sacrifice the profit motive which fuels our growth. On the one hand, they want mass immunisation; on the other, instead of democratising the industry this process relies on, power remains in a few hands, slowing it down.

Publically, both the European Commission and the EU 27 heads of state preach the urgency of making Covid vaccines accessible to all, while in practice they hesitate to force “Big Pharma” to outsource production stages to speed up supply and adoption.

Charles Michel, President of the European Council, recently contradicted himself in the space of a few weeks. First he suggested possible recourse to article 122 of the Lisbon Treaty for the centralised issuing of compulsory licenses (typically a national competence). Then, in early March, in a letter to the European Parliament, he denied that the patent monopoly is a problem.

For the moment, the only compromise adopted by the Commission to guarantee EU supply is the partial restriction on vaccine exports. This just leads to redu…