EDITORIAL: Pakistan’s performance during the pandemic was impressive by any standards, but it can’t get any better because it’s unable to take advantage of a rare WTO (World Trade Organisation) waiver that eases intellectual property restrictions on mRNA jabs, which enables countries to produce vaccines against multiple viral diseases, especially Covid.
And the reason is that the country does not even have one biotechnology plant capable of producing such vaccines. That’s why senior officials at NIH (National Institute of Health) fear that this opportunity, which stems from a proposal tabled by India and South Africa in October 2020 in light of the Covid pandemic, might go begging. This is a shame.
It also raises a number of very important questions. One, having handled the worst of the pandemic rather well, the best way forward is to produce jabs locally and get as much of the fifth largest population in the world vaccinated as soon as possible and also at the lowest possible cost.
But since we cannot benefit from this window, and the Balance of Payments (BoP) is already under severe strain, who will tell us how much more importing more vaccines will cost than producing them locally; if we had that capability? Two, we’ve sent a couple of scientists to a couple of countries to train for this facility, but whenever they come back they will still need procedural approval, and then also wait for the required facility to be set up? How long, then, will the official machinery take to sanction that outlet and at what cost?
Three, has anybody realised that this shows, all over again, how ill-equipped we are to meet the most pressing challenges of the 21st century? If we don’t have a plant that can produce crucial, life-saving vaccines, then we clearly don’t have too many people qualified enough to work on these things; much less advance global research.
Yet the calendars of our top politicians are far too filled with issues like grabbing power, hanging on to power, upsetting the whole applecart if that’s what it takes to have power, etc., to give the people’s, or the country’s, most pressing concerns too much of their time.
And four, even if our scientists return armed with the skills needed to erect the kind of facility that is needed, and the state is able to grant enough land and money to get it up and running in a couple of years, but WTO’s lease expires in that time, will the matter of intellectual property rights be taken up by the courts again?
It’s precisely because such questions remain unanswered that we haven’t yet even been able to get the ball rolling on essential reforms. Our friends the Chinese were able to construct a whole hospital in just a few days, complete with all the latest facilities to deal with an emerging pandemic, when Covid first struck.
And here we are, an older country and one that still had a better start, with a large part of the population deprived of even the most basic medical treatment. It’s really no surprise, considering such things, that we have not even thought about building the kind of human resource and academic infrastructure that is needed in this day and age.
The government must give this issue very serious attention. That last thing anybody needs is for the country, especially the economy, to suffer just because we squandered the initiative we so painstakingly built against Covid. And that too simply because we were incapable of building on our lead.
Missing this window will cost Pakistan much. The best we can do now is keep it at a minimum.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2022