"Come, and trip it as ye go, On the light fantastick toe"- John Milton, "Allegro"
Yesterday's statement by USTR Ambassador Katherine Tai that the US will support efforts in the WTO for a vaccine waiver is a big deal. "Massive", "huge", "immense" are adjectives being used. Even progressives often skeptical that President Biden has really shed his centrist Democrat roots are hailing the move as a sea shift. Today in the Financial Times' "Trade Secrets" Alan Beattie offers one of the best quick takes on what's really significant here. (Beattie has been following this issue closely, early on digging beneath the slogans and posturing).
First of all, as Beattie notes, Tai's statement suggests the US is actively backing only a waiver for vaccines, not the full range of medical products that can be used in treating COVID-19. Thus, the US position will likely be narrower than the original proposal by India and South Africa. But as Beattie shrewdly observes:
[The original draft] was always a tactical position designed to start a debate, idenitfy possible support and flush out possible opponents rather than a likely outcome. To this end, it seems to have worked rather well. Pretoria and New Delhi are in any case in the process of reworking and narrowing their text, with progress likely in a few days. Our supposition is that the US will come up with its own tightly drawn proposal and negotiations will start.
As Beattie further notes, the US position liberates countries to use existing TRIPs flexibilities more boldy (and thus potentially has a positive effect even before any waiver is concluded):
In practice, the US government looking more kindly on overriding IP will probably make other governments more confident that they won't face a lot of political pressure or potential litigation on the issue. If you are an emerging market minister thnking of issuing a compulsory licence, it's going to be a lot easier facing down a multialteral pharma company lobbying against you if you can simply tap the framed printout of Tai's Trips waiver tweet you have prominently displayed on your desk and smile knowingly.
And this is not a case of the US grudgingly accepting to stay on the sidelines and let a properly drafted waiver pass. As Ambassador Tai made clear in interviews yesterday, as reported by Bloomberg, the US is "for the waiver" and will use what Tai calls America's "convening power" in the WTO to assure a positive solution that lifts patent protection for vaccines. As Beattie puts it succinctly, "the US is leading the debate inside the WTO again." Tai hinted that the US will be judging the WTO on whether what she calls "the consensus-based nature of the institution" can generate a successful outcome in real time on the crucial challenge of the day. This is a matter, as she puts it, of seeing "what the WTO is capable of" and of trying to make the WTO "relevant" and "a force for good."
The US aligning at the WTO with South Africa and India (as well as the rest of the devleoping world & global civil society) points to a new era of American leadership on trade and the global economy. Perhaps the only kind of leadership that can really match China and halt its growing dominance in multilateral institutions. Supporting the waiver, as many (including Beattie himelf) have said, packs a huge symbolic punch. Or, as I might prefer to put it, this can change perceptions of America in much of the globe. Most of the world's population, and certainly its rising generations, have not seen much of the idealistic side of America's global footprint. Barack Obama talked idealistically but delivered drones and defended investor-state dispute settlement, special tribunals for corporations largely to attack the regulatory state in the developing world (something Biden has categorically repudiated, by the way). That now the US Administration is staring down some of its most powerful commercial interests to protect lives around the world is a message that will not be lost on global public opinion.
So much for aspirations of Europhiles that it is EU's external policies that might enable a global "EUtopia." Beattie observes: "Katherine Tai's announcement evidently wasn't coordinated with prominent waiver scetpics such as the EU, Switzerland, the UK and Brazil, which are now scrambling to determine their positions." If Brussels obstructs US efforts at consensus on a waiver, whatever is still left of the EU credibility as an agent of global justice and human rights in its external economic policies will be gone. Perhaps this matters less to the Commission than serving its big corporate clients and their interests in intellectual property protection. But the Commission has put itself forward as determined to achieve the renewal and reform of the WTO with a common purpose for sustainable development, a supposed top priority. Good luck selling that if the EU is the dealbreaker in Geneva on a vaccine waiver that would save untold numbers of lives globally.
[
