Germany is donating 30 million doses of coronavirus vaccines, and more could follow in the near future.
“We should be able to provide considerably more than these 30 million doses. This is our baseline. And in the next coming weeks and months, we should be able to provide more doses,” German Health Minister Jens Spahn said during a press briefing Thursday.
About 80% of its dose donations will be through COVAX, the global procurement mechanism for COVID-19 vaccines, while around 20% will be given bilaterally to countries, such as those in the Western Balkans, Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, and Namibia, a former German colony.
Spahn also announced a new donation of €260 million ($310 million) for the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 response. This new money brings Germany’s contributions to the United Nations agency since 2020 to almost $1 billion, he said.
But Germany is adamant about maintaining intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines.
“The German position concerning patents for vaccines ... has not changed fundamentally,” Spahn said. “The goal is to vaccinate the world as fast as possible, to give everyone around the world access to vaccines,” he added, arguing that the question of patents “does not resolve the fundamental issue.”
“We think that this debate does not actually address the real problem. So it's very ideological. We can have this debate, but the really important question is: What is the fastest way to produce as much vaccine as possible for the world?” he continued.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said raising the issue of intellectual property would have been unnecessary if vaccines were in large enough supply to ensure fair distribution and if companies had responded to calls for voluntary licensing, or sharing their technology to increase vaccine production.
However, only one company — AstraZeneca — has so far responded to these calls, he said.
“If the other companies have done the same thing, we could have better volume to share,” Tedros said. He added that this has resulted in a market failure that needs to be addressed, with an IP waiver being one way to do this.
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WHO appreciates that companies developed vaccines in less than a year, he said, but the private sector also has a social responsibility during the pandemic. High-income countries can provide incentives by including the private sector in their stimulus packages to address any potential financial losses that companies may incur by waiving intellectual property rights.
An IP waiver could be implemented within a limited period, such as one or two years, or only for specific products such as COVID-19 vaccines, he said.
Spahn, however, said a waiver won’t solve the problem of supply. Companies are cooperating with one another to boost production, and 2022 may even see overcapacity related to messenger RNA vaccines, he added.
“There are so many cooperations on the way that actually what we want to reach, what we want to achieve, can be achieved without ... these waiver regulations,” he said.