Master student Tessa Jager won the third prize in an essay challenge organised by the Netherlands-America Foundation (NAF). She presented her essay, “Investing, contracting, buying: how WHOVAX will enhance vaccine equity for the next pandemic”, on 19 November 2021 at the NAF’s annual ball in New York City.
In her essay, Tessa addresses one of the most pertinent obstacles to vaccine equity, which is the unequal distribution of vaccines across the developed and the developing world. As a solution, she proposes a permanent World Health Organization (WHO) investment system called WHOVAX. WHOVAX combines elements of COVAX and the Oxford-AstraZeneca agreement. The system will allow the WHO to invest in pharmaceutical companies in exchange for the right to buy eventually developed vaccines at cost prizes.
"An important aspect of the challenge for the NAF was whether the essays constituted realistically executable ideas”, explained Tessa. “While I personally believe that the fastest and most effective road to vaccine equity is to curb the intellectual property rights of the pharmaceutical industry, we live in a world in which the development of life-saving vaccines is under the control of profit-driven, private, multinational companies. This results in the distribution of vaccines being based on whose government has the most negotiating power. Since having good health is, in many aspects, a prerequisite for someone to make use of his/her possibilities in life, I think it is unacceptable that we cast the instruments away to the whims of scarcity and negotiation power. But if this is how it is, you can at least try to create equity within the system, and that’s what I tried to show in my essay".
With WHOVAX, Tessa proposes a system to establish equity by setting up a permanent fund managed by the WHO and filled by donations or membership fees from the WHO’s members. Once the next pandemic emerges, the WHO would have the financial resources to fund vaccine research themselves and therefore also to require equity in reciprocity. This way, the next pandemic will see a more equal vaccine distribution globally.
Tessa is a first-year International Law student at the Graduate Institute. She is from the Netherlands and holds an LL.B. in law from Utrecht University. Before coming to Geneva, she worked for the Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation, where she coordinated the "Good COVID-19 Company Practices Project". This project aimed to hold pharmaceutical companies developing vaccines and medicines against COVID-19 accountable for their non-compliance with applicable legal and ethical norms. She is passionate about global health and hopes to find creative legal solutions for health inequalities in the future.