Big Tobacco Is Funding Opposition to Global Covid Vaccine Access-Part 2

The first part please click here.

The company added, "We do not disclose our contributions due to confidentiality reasons."

Indeed, the tobacco industry has plenty of other financial interests in supporting the CCC, like the group's lobbying against a proposed vape and nicotine tax in Georgia, or its creation of the World Vapers' Alliance. But, Japan Tobacco International's statement that it is not involved with CCC's work on TRIPS does not rule out that the company may implicitly understand that CCC will pursue this work; corporate donors often are not directly involved in shaping a think tank or organization's policies, yet finance them because they benefits from numerous aspects of their work. Either way, Japan Tobacco International is funding a group that opposes a TRIPS waiver, which has real consequence.

According to St. Louis of Public Citizen, opposition to public health measures, whether the TRIPS waiver or regulations, aren't so easily separated. "We know that tobacco companies have used TRIPS and other intellectual property provisions to undermine regulation," she says. "Tobacco companies are saying any regulation for public health is undermining their bottom line, and therefore they have every interest in the world to protect those intellectual property barriers over a public health measure."

In perhaps the clearest example of this interest in upholding intellectual property rules, the tobacco industry is directly involved in developing vaccines. In April of 2020, British American Tobacco announced that it is working on a "potential Covid-19 vaccine," via Kentucky BioProcessing, the company’s U.S. subsidiary that focuses on biotechnology. According to BAT, "the vaccine in development uses BAT’s proprietary, fast-growing tobacco plant technology which has several advantages over conventional vaccine production technology." In January 2022, BAT launched a new company, KBio Holdings Limited, which will subsume the Covid vaccine work and focus on "using tobacco plants to develop biologics and vaccines for rare and infectious disease." The company says that study of the vaccine "remains ongoing."

BAT is not alone. Philip Morris International owns an approximately one-third stake in the Canadian company, Medicago, whose plant-based Covid vaccine was approved for use in Canada in February. But in March, the World Health Organization announced it was blocking its global prospects, by rejecting the company's application for emergency use authorization, "because of the linkage with the tobacco industry and WHO’s strict policy on not engaging with companies that promote tobacco."

Whatever the obstacles, any companies in the business of vaccine development would have a stake in opposing a TRIPS waiver. But the industry's interests in intellectual property rules extend beyond vaccines: Tobacco companies have a host of patents for things like e-cigarette technology and heated tobacco sticks. And in fierce legal battles over alleged patent infringement, companies like British American Tobacco vow to enforce global patent rules.

But there is another purpose the WTO's TRIPS rules have specifically served for the industry: They have been used by companies to attempt to roll back laws aimed at protecting the public from the products of the tobacco industry, as the case of Australia shows.

Since 2012, Australia has enforced a rule, Tobacco Plain Packaging Act 2011, requiring plain, drab, logo-free packaging for tobacco goods, a requirement aimed at undercutting the use of packaging for branding and marketing - and thereby reducing the appeal of tobacco products in order to prevent disease and death. (Globally, tobacco kills more than 8 million people annually.) The tobacco industry legally challenged the rule, both in Australia and via an investment treaty between Australia and Hong Kong. Meanwhile, with reported legal advice from tobacco companies, tobacco exporting countries Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Indonesia and Ukraine turned to the WTO to challenge the rule. (Ukraine ceased its involvement in 2015.)

Among other charges, complainants said that the plain packaging rule violated the WTO's TRIPS agreement. "The complainants made a large number of intellectual property-related claims, of which the one the panel most extensively discussed was the claim that plain packaging breached article 20 of TRIPS," explains a paper by the McCabe Centre for Law and Cancer. That article mandates that "the use of a trademark in the course of trade shall not be unjustifiably encumbered by special requirements."

While Australia was ultimately victorious against these challenges, the state spent public funds defending its health rule.

According to St. Louis of Public Citizen, this track record is now playing out during a deadly pandemic. "The tobacco industry has historically attempted to use intellectual property rules to block meaningful tobacco control measures in countries around the world," she says, "and I assume that’s why they want to uphold those rules."

Source: inthesetimes.com

Editor: IPR Daily-Selly