A top contender to lead the World Trade Organization wants the group to help decide how vaccine doses are allocated around the world.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala from Nigeria is one of two African candidates to advance to the penultimate round of the search to replace Director-General Roberto Azevedo, who is stepping down early from his second term in the role.
Azevedo, 62, who was supposed to lead the WTO until August 2021, left amid calls by the United States, Japan, and the European Union for changes regarding what they see as an imbalance of international trade with China. His announced departure puts global cooperation and lifting trade barriers in jeopardy.
The WTO has not implemented a major international agreement since it failed to implement the Doha Development Agenda twice — first in 2005 and then in 2006. A new target to complete the agenda has not been established, and talks have largely stalled.
Despite criticism that the WTO has become too deferential to Beijing’s interests, Okonjo-Iweala said that the trade organization can “contribute to more accessibility and affordability, eventually, for vaccines and for therapies” by taking advantage of existing WTO intellectual property rules that would provide poorer countries with special licenses to distribute coronavirus-related medicine.
“Trade can contribute to public health,” she said. “Seeing that connection, invoking [WTO] rules, actively discussing COVID-19 issues, and how WTO can help — for me, that would be a priority.”
Okonjo-Iweala is the chairwoman of GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, a global public-private partnership created to increase access in poorer countries to new immunizations.
Global teamwork toward developing, let alone distributing, a vaccine has been shaky at best. In July, a U.K. intelligence agency accused Russian hackers of attempting to steal coronavirus research from U.S. laboratories. The advisory echoed a May warning from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that China was attempting to hack coronavirus research facilities.
