by RAY MWAREYA
The extortionate vaccine contracts Pretoria signed during the pandemic demonstrate why achieving pharmaceutical sovereignty should be a priority for all developing nations.
In August, a Supreme Court ruling forced South Africa’s government to make public the secretive vaccine supply contracts it struck with big pharmaceutical companies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The documents confirmed what many have long suspected: When selling its COVID vaccines to Global South countries, Big Pharma’s priority was not to help them bring a deadly pandemic under control, but to maximise its bottom line.
Every single contract – there were a total of four that were revealed, with Johnson & Johnson (J&J), Pfizer, the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (Gavi), and the Serum Institute of India – turned out to overwhelmingly favour Big Pharma and demand South Africa pay much more than its more powerful counterparts to protect its citizens from the worst of COVID.
An analysis of the contracts by the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), the South African health equality non-profit that launched the legal bid to get the contracts released, revealed that J&J charged South Africa 15 percent more per dose of its COVID vaccine than it charged the European Union, while Pfizer-BioNTech charged the country nearly 33 percent more than it reportedly charged the African Union. The biggest apparent markup paid by South Africa was to the Serum Institute of India, maker of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. South Africa paid $5.35 a dose, compared with the EU’s price of $2.15.
What we found in these contracts was shocking – in fact, infuriating – but not at all surprising. Anybody paying a little attention to the global pharmaceutical market already knows that Big Pharma companies have been pressurising countries across the Global South to buy their essential medicines and vaccines for extortionate prices and under exploitative conditions since long before the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nevertheless, getting to read these contracts in their entirety was still a big win for health equality advocates in Africa and beyond. All Big Pharma companies employ large teams of top-quality lawyers to keep their unethical and unfair contracts secret, and the governments bullied into signing those contracts also try their best to keep them hidden from the public. So while we have always known that Big Pharma is exploiting Global South governments, we did not know to what extent until we saw the shameful contracts signed by South Africa.
Furthermore, the revelation that the Serum Institute, a vaccine manufacturer based in the Global South, and, Gavi, which was supposedly formed to improve equitable access to vaccines across the globe, joined in the bullying of COVID-stricken South Africa into signing unfavourable contracts. According to the contract made public, Gavi gave no guarantees to South Africa about the number of doses it would receive, or the delivery date, but South Africa remained liable to pay for everything it ordered, making it obvious that smaller Global South nations cannot depend on anyone other than themselves when it comes to delivering life-saving vaccines and medicines to their citizens in a timely manner.
Now that we know the severity of the problem, we need to take action. We need to treat what we learned about South Africa’s treatment by Big Pharma as a wakeup call and make sure no Global South government finds itself in a similarly helpless situation when the next pandemic inevitably knocks on our door.
Al Jazeera for more