Okonjo-Iweala calls for more vaccine production in developing countries

The Director-General of the World Trade Organisation, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, on Tuesday, called on COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to do more to ramp up production in developing countries to combat the vaccine supply shortage that is excluding many lower-income nations from access.

In remarks to an event hosted by the UK think tank Chatham House, she said cooperation on trade, and action at the WTO would help accelerate vaccine scale-up, according to a statement.

The scarcity of COVID-19 vaccine supplies had led to a situation in which around 60 countries are able to move ahead with vaccination while 130 countries wait as people die, Okonjo-Iweala told the Global C19 Vaccine Supply Chain and Manufacturing Summit.

She said not only was this morally “unconscionable,” it would prolong the pandemic and cause economic harm to all countries.

Instead of restricting exports and bidding up prices, she argued, “it is in all of our self-interest to cooperate in dealing with this problem of the global commons.”

The WTO DG saw cause for hope in the first vaccine deliveries to developing countries by the COVAX facility, the global mechanism for procuring and equitably distributing COVID-19 vaccines.

“We have to scale up and scale out COVID-19 vaccine production, particularly in emerging markets and developing countries,” she said.

Given the years required to build new manufacturing facilities from scratch, increasing production in the short-term means “making the most of existing manufacturing capacity – finding existing sites and turning them around.”

Recent experience suggests that repurposing facilities and vetting them for safety and quality can happen in six or seven months, less than half as long as previously thought, according to the statement.

Okonjo-Iweala said by bringing more production online around the world, vaccine manufacturers would send a signal that they are taking action, and “that people and governments in low- and middle-income countries can expect to get access to affordable vaccines within a reasonable timeframe.”

She observed that companies in India and elsewhere were already manufacturing COVID-19 vaccines under licence but said that more such arrangements were necessary.

Because vaccine production relies on sourcing components and ingredients from multiple countries, she said, trade restrictions would slow down production, and make it more expensive.

According to her, WTO rules do allow for export restrictions or prohibitions to be temporarily applied to prevent or relieve critical shortages of essential products.

That said, such restrictions must be notified to all members. Restrictions should be transparent, proportionate to the problem at hand, and members should provide timelines for when they will be phased out, she said.

She reported that WTO monitoring indicates that 59 members and seven observers still had some pandemic-related export restrictions or licensing requirements in place at the end of February, primarily for personal protective equipment.

It was welcome that these figures were lower than the 91 countries that had brought in such measures over the past year. However, “not all pandemic-related export restrictions have been notified,” she said. “Not all of them appear to be temporary. Not all of them are proportionate.”

“We must strengthen our monitoring and reporting function,” DG Okonjo-Iweala said, explaining that her objective would be to encourage members to drop or reduce export restrictions, or set timelines for phaseout, to help minimise problems in the vaccine supply chain.

With regard to trade-related bureaucracy, she invited manufacturers to tell the WTO about the problems they are encountering in real time, “so we can put them before our membership and find ways they can be minimized and if possible solved.”

She said a little-appreciated fact about trade policy during the pandemic is that members’ trade-facilitating measures, such as electronic customs procedures and simplified paperwork requirements, have far outnumbered trade-restricting policies, and covered a higher value of merchandise.

On both export restrictions and trade facilitation, Okonjo-Iweala noted, prospects for action at the WTO would improve as businesses are seen to step up efforts on vaccine production.

“We must make sure that in the end we deliver so that the millions of people who are waiting for us with bated breath know that we are working on concrete solutions,” she said.