Progressive campaigners on WednesdaydenouncedG20 nations for offering lip service to the importance of treating coronavirus vaccines as a “global public good” while simultaneously blocking aneffortto lift restrictive patent protections and share vaccine recipes with the developing world.

After a virtual meeting on Wednesday afternoon, finance ministers from the G20 countries released an eight-page joint communiquedeclaring that they “recognize the role of Covid-19 immunization as a global public good and reiterate our support to all collaborative efforts, especially to the four pillars of the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) and its COVAX Facility.”

But the document does not express support for a South Africa and India-led proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) calling for a temporarysuspensionof vaccine-related intellectual property rights, which have kept production largely under the control of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies.

More than 100 countries worldwide have backed the patent waiver proposal. While Argentina and Indonesia havejoined South Africa and India in supporting the waiver, the remaining G20 member nationsincluding the US, UK, and Canadahave been either non-committal or actively opposed to the idea, leaving the deeply unequal status quointact.

The result has been a disaster for low-income nations, many of which are struggling toadminister a single doseof the coronavirus vaccine as rich countrieswhere the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies are basedhoardmuch of the existing supply.

In astatement on Wednesday, Daniel Willis of the UK-based advocacy group Global Justice Now said “it’s very nice that the G20 see Covid-19 immunization ‘as a global public good,’ but the reality is that G20 countries have privatized the medical knowledge behind Covid vaccines, artificially limiting supply and preventing most of the world producing the vaccines we so desperately need.”

“They should have taken this moment to commit to putting the health of people across the world ahead of Big Pharma’s profits,” added Willis.

Scientists havewarnedthat failure to swiftly ensure global distribution of the coronavirus vaccine could allow vaccine-resistant variants to emerge and spread among unprotected populations, causing further devastation for developing countries and prolonging the deadly pandemic for the entire world.

On top of the human costs of denying vaccines to poor nations, Oxfam Internationalpointed out on Tuesday that vaccine inequities could inflict enormous economic damage, costing the world up to $9.2 trillionin income losses.

Citingestimatespublished in a study by the International Chamber of Commerce earlier this year, Oxfam calculated that “the United States could lose up to $2,700 per person in household spending in 2021” due to the global economic impacts of highly unequal vaccine distribution.

“Rich countries are defending the interests of the pharmaceutical sector over other businesses and their economies as a whole,” said Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s public health manager. “It is a bizarre act of financial and economic self-harm. They are condemning everyone including their own citizens to suffer the consequences.”

“The US, UK, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy together could lose as much as $2.3 trillion in GDP this year unless they stop fighting on behalf of a handful of big drug companies to retain the intellectual property of the vaccinedespite this status quo plainly failing both them and everyone else,” Marriott added. “It totally beggars belief.”

This article was written by Jake Johnson and has been republished from _Common Dreams_7 April 2021 under the Creative Commons License. Click here to read the original article.