When this novel coronavirus first swept the world last year, it was quickly obvious global vaccination was the only way out.

Governments invested billions in public funding and guaranteed pre-orders to corporations like Moderna, Pfizer/BioNtech, Johnson & Johnson, Novovax and Oxford/AstraZeneca to incentivise vaccine research and development.

Never before has a vaccine been created and tested so quickly. It was a tribute to human ingenuity and creativity, and a reminder of how powerful we are when we work together.

• READ MORE: COVID-19 vaccines have spawned nine new billionaires: campaign group

Yet, a year after the first person was vaccinated, less than 2 percent of people in the poorest countries have benefited.

Ahead of their annual shareholder meetings earlier this year, major vaccine producers, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca revealed they had paid out US$26 billion in dividends and stock buybacks to shareholders in the previous 12 months.

Nine individuals have become billionaires off the back of coronavirus vaccines. Just how are these pharmaceutical corporations and their shareholders making their money?

Pharmaceutical corporations will not share their covid-19 vaccine intellectual property. This means they have a monopoly over a precious resource everyone needs. This gives them the power to charge excessive prices to maximise their profit. And this is what they have done.

Governments paying 4 to 24 times more than cost
Governments worldwide are paying between 4 and 24 times more than the estimated cost of producing the covid-19 vaccines. Experts, including Imperial College London, estimate the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines can be produced for as little as NZ$1.70.

According to reported prices that are available, even COVAX — the international facility set up to buy vaccines especially for poor countries — is paying an average of five times this cost.

Pfizer/BioNTech are charging their lowest reported price of NZ$9.70 to the African Union but this is still nearly six times more than the estimated production cost.

Israel has paid the highest reported price for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines at NZ$40.26 a dose – nearly 24 times the potential production cost. Some reports suggest they paid even more.

In New Zealand, while the details are not public, we do know that in the 2021 Budget the Government set aside NZ$1 billion for vaccines. Assuming we have paid for all the vaccines that we have pre-purchase agreements for from this amount, (which is probably a generous assumption), we have paid at least nine times more than production costs.

As we consider the need for booster shots, Pfizer has suggested raising prices further.

I don’t buy the argument that pharmaceutical corporations have to charge so much because they invest in risky research and development. As stated, billions of public dollars went into the research and development of covid-19 vaccines.

Previous public investment
These vaccines would not be possible without decades of previous public investment in research and development.

Over the past 80 years, the US’s National Institutes of Health alone invested almost US$900 billion in biotech and pharmaceutical research, and continues to put in US$30 billion a year.

It is not pharmaceutical corporations investing in the risk of uncertainty, but governments across the world.

Besides that, pharmaceutical corporations spend more on marketing than on research and development. In 2013, Johnson & Johnson spent more than twice as much on sales and marketing than on R&D: US$17.5 billion versus US$8.2 billion.

For Pfizer, it was US$11.4 billion on marketing versus US$6.6 billion on R&D. Marketing costs are also tax deductible.

Further, economist Mariana Mazzucato reports pharmaceutical corporations put their profits into dividends and share buybacks that increase stock prices and CEO pay. That is precisely what we are seeing during this pandemic.

Put simply, the public fund the bulk of pharmaceutical research and development. Pharmaceutical corporations get the intellectual property and know-how, then force the public to pay again for vaccines, at prices far above a reasonable profit.

Money goes to already wealthy individuals
The ultimate result is public money going into the pockets of already wealthy individuals.

While they get rich, millions fall back into extreme poverty – living on less than NZ$2.70 a day – and the coronavirus continues to circulate and mutate, potentially rendering these vaccines obsolete and holding us all to ransom for years to come.

Soon negotiations will be under way again at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to get consensus among governments to waive the intellectual property rights for covid-19 vaccines.

New Zealand supports this waiver, but the challenge is to persuade countries such as Germany and the UK. If this can be achieved, it will break the pharmaceutical corporations’ monopoly and allow vaccine supply to expand and the cost to drop.

The work doesn’t end there. How can we recreate our system to develop essential medicines and get them to everyone, using public funds for collective well-being, and avoid creating another handful of billionaires?

Dr Jo Spratt is the advocacy and communications director at Oxfam Aotearoa. This article is republished with the permission of the author and Oxfam.

It is now certain that any decisions on the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) minus the US will take place after New Zealand’s general election this month.

Last week’s meeting of the negotiators from the remaining 11 TPPA countries rebuffed the National government’s wish to proceed with the agreement basically unchanged aside from new provisions for its entry into force.

They have all agreed to suspend (but not remove) some of the most controversial intellectual property provisions that hiked the price of medicines. Other countries want parts of the actual text and countries’ schedules reopened.

Each country has to come back with its wish-list at another meeting in Japan later this month, probably while the New Zealand government is in caretaker mode after the September 23 election.

Post-election, a Labour-led government would inherit a poisoned chalice. But its position to date gives no confidence that Labour will take a stand against the resurrection of the deal, despite the groundswell of opposition from its own core membership.

READ MORE: Response of the opposition parties to the 10 bottom lines for NZ’s future trade policy

Labour Party leader Jacinda Adern recently defended the party’s “bloody minded” opposition to the agreement. But its only firm position is an objection to a single, very specific provision in the entire 30-chapter deal: the right to discriminate against foreign purchasers of residential property in the schedule on investment.

Does Labour really intend to agree to the TPPA-11 if that minor matter is changed (as it has been in a leaked copy I have of New Zealand’s proposed schedule to the now-suspended Trade in Services Agreement negotiations)?

Hiking the price of medicines
What about the intellectual property provisions the US insisted on that will hike the price of medicines and put taxpayer money into the pockets of Big Pharma – money Labour will desperately need to upgrade our rundown hospitals and fund primary health care for our poorest communities?

To date they will be suspended, but not removed, so they can be reactivated if the US rejoins. If the New Zealand Medical Association can call for those rules to be dropped, surely it’s a safe enough bet for the Labour Party to do so?

Or the investor-state dispute mechanism. David Parker’s position is that Labour would prefer not to have them. Grow a spine! Even Crawford Falconer, the ex-MFAT official who is now the UK’s new free trade negotiator, says it should be dropped from such deals.

Parker also insists that the Treaty of Waitangi exception is the best possible drafting imaginable, and claims the Waitangi Tribunal endorsed it. In fact the Tribunal said:

“The Crown however goes further and says that nothing in the TPPA will prevent the Crown from meeting its Treaty obligations to Māori. We have some reservations about this. … Our concern is that by qualifying the Treaty exception clause to that aspect of the Treaty relationship which may allow the Crown to adopt or implement measures more favourable to Māori, the full constitutional reach of the Treaty relationship may not be as clearly protected and preserved under the TPPA as it might be.”

A Labour Party that is pitching to reclaim all the Māori seats can, and must, do better.

So far as I can see, Labour has not even called for the government’s new modelling on the TPPA-11 to be made public, despite having pointed to the failings of the initial modelling in its minority report on the original TPPA.

Leadership on record
Labour’s leadership needs to go on record before the election with some more detailed and convincing answers to these questions, and its position on other toxic provisions affecting the right to regulate on state-owned enterprises, government procurement, financial services and taxation.

Above all, Labour needs to commit now to a genuine consultation about what position New Zealand should take on the TPPA-11 (given the massive input into the original select committee hearing that was arrogantly ignored); to publish any future mandate it takes into the negotiations (as the EU does in its negotiations); and to support its position with a comprehensive, independent and public cost-benefit analysis.

Or does Labour intend to retreat behind the same wall of secrecy as National has in these renegotiations?

Jacinda Ardern, Grant Robertson, David Parker, anyone in the Labour leadership – can we know your real position on the TPP-11 before the election please?

Dr Jane Kelsey is a professor of law at the University of Auckland and a prominent New Zealand critic of globalisation. This article is republished from The Daily Blog with permission.

One of the biggest and most controversial trade deals in history has been signed by ministers from the Asia-Pacific region and the Americas, as tens of thousands of protesters hit the streets to denounce it.

Security was stepped up across Auckland for representatives who travelled here to sign the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) – a deal involving 12 economies worth about $28 trillion.

Prime Minister John Key said the deal would benefit everybody.

“The opening of our markets will enhance the lives of our people. The TPP will make new trade opportunities. It is overwhelmingly in the best interests of our countries and our citizens,” Key said.

The TPP is a free trade agreement promising to liberalise trade and investment between the 12 nations, which make up about 36 percent of the world’s GDP.

The deal – which will cut tariffs, improve access to markets and sets common ground on labour and environmental standards and intellectual property protections – was finally reached in October after five years of negotiations.

It includes Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the US, and Vietnam.

Cheaper access
The TPP is supposed to ensure everyone from Vietnamese shrimpers to New Zealand dairy farmers get cheaper access to markets and bring in economic benefits.

Ministers received a traditional Māori welcome from members of the Ngati Whatua tribe – including a hongi, which involves the pressing of noses and exchange of breath.

But the welcome wasn’t as warm in downtown Auckland where thousands of protesters from different groups blockaded the inner city in a rally against the deal.

Many carried flags and banners and chanted outside the SkyCity convention centre where the signing took place.

Protest organisers estimated the crowd to be more than 20,000 – it was one of the biggest protests seen in New Zealand since the 1981 Springbok tour.

‘No balance of interests’
Rowan Brooks, a protest organiser, said he was concerned about the power the agreement would give to big corporations.

“Basically it eats away at New Zealand’s sovereignty and the whole process was undemocratic… The agreement gives power to corporations and takes it away from the people,” Brooks said.

Jane Kelsey, a law professor at the University of Auckland, is one of the agreement’s fiercest critics.

She said she was concerned about how the deal could be used by the US to counter China’s influence in the region.

“It’s kind of a Cold War by proxy of trade and investment agreements,” Kelsey said. “And that’s a real worry because not only do the corporations who have special insights and input to this agreement get to be centre stage but there is no balance of interests.”

The deal has not only triggered protests in New Zealand but has also drawn international criticism.

Former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz said it “may turn out to be the worst trade agreement in decades”.

Investors’ right to sue
In an opinion piece for the Guardian, Stiglitz wrote: “It gives foreign investors the right to sue governments in private international tribunals when they believe government regulations contravene the TPP’s terms.

“In 2016, we should hope for the TPP’s defeat and the beginning of a new trade era of agreements that don’t reward the powerful and punish the weak.”

The TPP is expected to come into force within two years, once countries have completed their domestic legislative procedures.

Questions have been raised over the ratification process as it coincides with the buildup to this year’s US presidential election. But US trade representative Michael Froman is confident it will be passed by the US Congress.

“We all have our domestic processes to go through and ours is clearly laid out… I believe at the end of the day… We will have the necessary bipartisan support for it to be approved,” he said.

A version of this article first appeared on Al Jazeera.

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