Applying the Roman Catholic Church’s set of moral principles on social concerns called Catholic social teaching (CST) on charity, distributive justice, private property and the common good, and utilising some secondary data and scientific literature, this article argues that establishing distributive justice for the global distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines must be a priority than donating millions of doses in the name of charity to address vaccine scarcity. Catholic social teaching teaches that the right to private property is a basic right but has moral limits and is subordinated to the moral principles on the universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good.
The current COVID-19 vaccines are developed by people and organisations outside the pharmaceutical companies and largely funded using taxpayers’ money. Thus, by virtue of justice, these vaccines must belong to all nations as global public health goods. Patents are to be suspended to allow poor countries to reproduce the popular vaccines and address the current vaccine shortage.
The announcement of the United States (US) during the recently concluded G7 Summit to donate 500 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines with an additional 870 million doses from top economies (BBC News
Yet, anatomising the ownership of the current popular vaccines reveals that the drug makers are not actually the absolute owners of these vaccines which are largely developed by scientists using public funds with the participation of policymakers and thousands of people in clinical trials. It is largely ‘owned’ morally by the public according to the Christian virtue of justice, that is, giving what is due. Thomas Cueni, the director-general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, has acknowledged that without public funds, vaccine manufacturers could not have been able to produce the current COVID-19 vaccines (Cueni
The current global shortage of vaccines has prompted India and South Africa to file a request in October 2020 in the WTO to temporarily waive the patent or ownership rights of pharmaceutical companies to their vaccines to allow poorer countries to reproduce them locally (Labonte & Johri
The call for patent waivers and sharing of property rights for COVID-19 vaccines do not have the support of the pharmaceutical industry and wealthy countries, which prefer donating doses by way of charity through vaccine-provision schemes such as COVAX, the global initiative set up by the WHO that ensures equitable access to new COVID-19 vaccines for at best 20% of the population in poorer countries (Bassi
Donating millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines does not promote justice to allow equitable access by all nations to the vaccines. It only reinforces the status quo. It implies that the US and wealthy countries would still be buying millions of doses using taxpayers’ money at manufacturers’ prices, allowing the top pharmaceutical companies to keep their patents and absolute ownership of their vaccines. It also implies paternalism, making poorer countries dependent on the alms of wealthier countries, rather than empowering the former to participate in the ownership and production of these vaccines as public health goods. It is from public knowledge and participation in research risks that the current COVID-19 vaccines were developed by scientists whose research studies are performed in public institutions, supported by private and public organisations, and financed largely by taxpayers’ money (Navarro
The social issue on how to address the global shortage of COVID-19 vaccines and loosen the absolute patent control of big pharmaceutical firms to the popular vaccines often focuses on their legal, logistical and technical aspects but sidelines the moral dimension. Specifically, analysing the moral justification of the current vaccine distribution set-up and absolute ownership of COVID-19 vaccines by top drug companies from the Catholic moral point of view, specifically from a set of moral principles of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) called Catholic social teaching (CST), has been neglected by scholars and policymakers. There is a limited theological literature that uses CST principles to explain why distributive justice must first be established to provide greater access of the poor to COVID-19 vaccines as public goods before acts of charity by rich nations to address vaccine scarcity. Catholic social teaching teaches that an authentic Christian charity demands justice. Charity cannot be used as an excuse to maintain social inequality. As Pope Benedict XVI (
Works of charity – almsgiving – are in effect a way for the rich to shirk their obligation to work for justice and a means of soothing their consciences, while preserving their own status and robbing the poor of their rights. Instead of contributing through individual works of charity to maintaining the status quo, we need to build a just social order in which all receive their share of the world’s goods and no longer have to depend on charity. (para. 26)
The morality of the big pharmaceutical companies’ current control and ownership of vaccines, which are crucial and essential to put an end to the current COVID-19, has not been analysed carefully by Catholic moral theologians, although the RCC has developed a set of social doctrines called CST to guide Christians, policymakers, business firms and state authorities on how to establish a just and moral society. This article aims to explain why distributive justice must prevail over donation of excess vaccine doses in the global vaccine distribution system, claiming that these vaccines have communal character and should be treated as global public health goods under CST’s moral principles on distributive justice, universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good.
This article has two major parts. The first part briefly elaborates CST’s moral doctrines on justice and charity, solidarity, subsidiarity, distributive justice, the universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good as the article’s theoretical foundation to morally justify the public good character of the COVID-19 vaccines. The second part scrutinises the absolute ownership of these vaccines by the big top drug makers and the morality of suspending patents rights in the light of CST’s moral principles on social dimension of private ownership and distributive justice. It argues that the current COVID-19 vaccines are chiefly created by scientists and the public or people outside the pharmaceutical companies, developed in government institutions, and funded by government funds; thus, vaccine ownership must be shared by all nations as public health goods under the moral principle of distributive justice, universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good. It calls for what Sariola (
Over the centuries, the RCC has developed a set of social doctrines called Catholic social teaching (CST) that guides believers and state authorities on how to form a society marked by peace, concord and justice towards all (Dulles
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It serves as ‘a set of principles for reflection, criteria for judgment and directives for action for all the members of the Church and society’ (
Two of the major social doctrines of the RCC are on charity and justice. For CST, it is always an obligation of all people and Christians to help those in misery. In the global arena, it implies that citizens of developed countries have a moral duty to share their wealth and resources and help poor people in least developed countries. However, helping others for CST requires respecting the human rights of all, giving what is due to everyone. The CST teaches that genuine charity demands justice in society, recognising and respecting the legitimate human rights of individuals and peoples (
In relation to COVID-19 vaccine distribution, doing justice implies morally establishing first whether the popular vaccines are privately owned by the pharmaceutical companies or publicly owned by all nations as global public health goods. If by virtue of justice, the public owns the vaccines, then wealthy nations must first require the WTO to waive the patents of these vaccines and allow poorer nations to manufacture them locally. They must also demand in the United Nations (UN) that drug makers and private and public institutions must assist developing countries to manufacture the vaccines. Before sharing extra doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to poor nations as an act of charity, rich nations must first morally establish justice. The proper moral response to address the current global vaccine scarcity is not doling out extra doses by rich countries in the name of charity but providing low- and middle-income countries with property rights they rightly deserved in the name of justice. Phelan et al. (
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For the RCC, there is no genuine charity without first establishing justice. Charity is the perfection of justice. It must not be used as a cover-up for an injustice:
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What connects justice, charity and the common good in society for CST are the moral principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. In today’s pandemic, nations, rich and poor, must work together in solidarity and subsidiarity to overcome obstacles and attain unity to achieve global herd immunity. For the Catholic Church, the principle of solidarity must be seen above all in its value as a moral virtue that determines the order of institutions.
Solidarity is an authentic moral virtue, not a:
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On the one hand, the principle of solidarity requires that men and women today must cultivate a greater awareness that they are debtors of the society of which they have become part:
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The principle of subsidiarity, on the other hand, requires that:
A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. (Catechism of the Catholic Church
For the RCC, it is impossible to promote the dignity of the person, especially during the current pandemic, without showing concern for the family, groups, associations and local territorial realities of society (Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace
Justice is generally understood as giving what is due to the other. For CST and other moral traditions, there are basically three basic types, namely: commutative justice, social justice and distributive justice. Commutative justice is a type of justice that requires fairness in all types of contracts between individuals or private social groups. Social justice requires that persons who have obligations to be active and productive in the life of society and society must enable them to participate in this way. But distributive justice requires that the allocation of income, wealth and power in society must be evaluated in light of its effects on persons whose basic material needs are unmet (United States Catholic Bishops
For CST, distributive justice deals with inequalities of wealth under the free-enterprise system of economics. It is anchored on the RCC’s moral principle called the universal destination of earth’s goods, which states that earth is created by God for the entire humanity and not to specific individuals or groups; thus, all people or nations must have equal ownership of it (Kilchrist & Block
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Private ownership is only a social mortgage and subordinated to the principle of the common good, which is defined by CST as ‘the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily’ (
With the global cooperation and sharing of resources and WHO’s ACT Accelarator, COVID-19 vaccines were developed and rolled out in the market in less than 12 months. This simply indicates communal sharing of resources for pharmaceutical research, which allowed companies to access the vast creative, intellectual and technological resources required to tackle the formidable challenge of turning the riches of the genome into a treasure trove of new treatments’ (Munos & Chin
Currently, Big Pharma still enjoys absolute property rights to the popular vaccines with patent rights to produce, sell or distribute them as they please. Under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs) by WTO, drug makers who own intellectual property hold exclusive rights to their medical products without competing generic products in the market. ‘This way, they are able to keep a foothold of the markets and the prices high with little competition over similar products’ (Sariola
This absolute ownership by the big pharmaceutical companies to their medical products proved to be the most serious obstacle faced by poorer nations to reproduce or manufacture the patented vaccines locally. More than one-third of the world’s population has no access to essential drugs and more than half of this group lives in the poorest regions of Africa and Asia (Sterckx
Allowing the drug makers to control the distribution of publicly funded COVID-19 vaccines is a serious violation of distributive justice as it results in the deprivation of access to poor countries. Distributive justice demands equitable distribution of economic goods and services in society (ed. Lamont
The idea that COVID-19 vaccines are public health goods started in the:
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Dhai (
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The concept of global public health good in relation to COVID-19 vaccines did not prosper in the WHA at the WHO. Despite the initiative of top leaders from developing countries, the only resolution adopted during the WHA was the recognition of immunisation, rather than vaccines themselves, as a global public good. And after this assembly, ‘the global legal landscape has shifted from a rhetoric of global public goods to a reality largely based on vaccine nationalism’ (Phelan et al.
In today’s pandemic, vaccines are essential health goods for the survival of humanity, especially for the poor. Before rich countries led by the US aim to donate COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries, they must first examine the ownership of these vaccines, whether they should be considered privately owned goods for profit or publicly owned global public health goods for all people. The CST fully supports the individuals and groups’ ownership of goods and services that they privately produced and financed but not when the public is chiefly involved in the development and funding of essential vaccines for humanity’s survival. In this case, the ownership assumes a communal character. The current initiative to develop COVID-19 vaccines involves a variety of private and public groups and organisations, as well as a cooperation of developed and developing nations in scientific research and solidarity clinical trials spearheaded by the WHO to test the efficacy of these vaccines and administer them to all people to attain global herd immunity.
‘Indeed, vaccine research and development, manufacturing, and delivery typically involves a long, deliberate process that takes a decade or more’ (Bloom et al.
Countries which want the COVID-19 vaccines as public goods or people’s vaccines cite public investment in vaccine development as a moral justification to sharing of property rights and waiving of patent protections. The US, for instance, has committed over 10 billion dollars (via Operation Warp Speed) with the aim of delivering 300 million doses of a safe and effective vaccines by January 2021 (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
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The EU president also acceded that Europe invested billions to help develop the world’s first COVID-19 vaccines (Thambisetty
Contrary to popular belief, the patent holders of COVID-19 vaccines did not fully develop and fund all the components of their products when the FDA gave them emergency use authorisation (Bloom et al.
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That includes low- and middle-income countries through solidarity trials (Bloom et al.
Moreover, the components of COVID-19 vaccines are obtained in government institutions with public funding.
Developing vaccines is always a difficult and time-consuming process because they are meant for people who have not yet manifested disease symptoms. Usually, it takes around 17 years for a vaccine to complete, from medical research to hospital use (Hanney et al.
Apart from utilising private and public funding for vaccine research and development, big pharmaceutical companies also utilise the network support from multilateral institutions such as the World Bank to expedite financial transactions. The CEPI, for instance, that supports vaccine development is supported by a World Bank financial intermediary fund to enable it to bring together public, philanthropic and private funding to respond to global priorities. Through this fund, CEPI can act as a global mechanism for funding vaccine development until vaccines can be licenced or used under emergency use provisions (Yamey et al.
Governments of rich countries also aided vaccine manufacturers to expedite their vaccine development and production. In the US, for instance, the primary role of vaccine manufacturers is to execute the clinical or process development and manufacturing plans, while the US government through its Operation Warp Speed (OWS) takes care of the technical, logistic or financial hurdles. Operation Warp Speed is a partner of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Defense (DOD) and the private sector to advance the development, manufacturing and distribution of vaccines by providing ‘support to promising candidates and enabling the expeditious, parallel execution of the necessary steps toward approval or authorization of safe products by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)’ (Slaoui & Hepburn
Thus, it only took less than a year for pharmaceutical firms to finish their COVID-19 vaccines. A great feat indeed because it normally takes more than a decade to create new vaccines. This unusual speed could not have been achieved without the support of governments of rich countries led by the US and Germany, scientists, participants in clinical trials, and various private and public institutions helping the pharmaceutical companies to expedite the development of the COVID-19 vaccines. Low- and middle-income countries participated largely in the clinical trials of these vaccines through the WHO’s solidarity trials, exposing their volunteers to possible serious negative effects or even deaths. They also provide raw materials and scientific input through their scientists through WHO’s vaccine accelerator to develop these jabs, thus Big Pharma saved a lot of production cost. And yet, they were not given an equal chance to access these vaccines to promptly immunise their citizens (Dyer
Navarro (
Catholic social teaching teaches that private ownership is a social mortgage and has moral limits. If the common good is already affected, private property must turn into public goods. For CST, the right to private property is not absolute and is subordinated to the moral principle called the universal destination of earth’s goods. Private ownership has a social dimension. It is a social mortgage and subordinated to the principle of the common good. Pope Leo XIII reminded the wealthy property owners on their binding moral obligation to share their monetary surplus with those in need: ‘Man should not consider his material possessions as his own, but as common to all, so as to share them without hesitation when others are in need’ (
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Sariola (
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Ownership patents give owners the right to exclude others from using the product, reduce competitive supply and increase prices. With intellectual monopoly capitalism, the quest to be competitive in global markets has led to economic concentration, oligopolies and a reduction in competition (Sell
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Krellenstein and Morten (
Once the invention is created, the patent in effect generates an artificial scarcity, allowing the value of the vaccine to be maintained, managed and even increased. The scarcity feeds on under-investment in capacity-building and reluctance to transfer technology and manufacturing know-how…It allows the patent holder to orchestrate the manufacture of the product through restrictive licencing. (p. 1)
Thus, the IPR system of the WTO blocks vaccine access of poor countries and legitimises the pharmaceutical industry to make exclusive decisions for their vaccines (Sariola
This article has shown that justice must first be established before charity and donation by rich countries can genuinely be done. Catholic social teaching teaches that authentic Christian charity demands justice. In the case of the COVID-19 distribution system, CST’s moral principle on distributive justice must first be served before rich nations donate millions of doses to poorer country as an act of charity. Distributive justice requires sharing of ownership and suspension of patents of the drug makers’ vaccines to allow poor and developing countries to reproduce them to protect the global common good and save the lives of the poor. Distributive justice is based on CST’s moral principles on the universal destination of earth’s goods and the common good. A close assessment of the ownership of the current COVID-19 vaccines revealed that the pharmaceutical companies did not totally develop and finance the vaccine development. Cooperation of various people and public funding allowed the fast development of the vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies’ main contribution is only in the commercialisation and rolling out of the vaccines in the market. Thus, the vaccines have a communal dimension and must be considered as global public health goods. Following CST’s doctrine that private ownership has moral limits and social dimension, patent waivers requested by India and South Africa in the WTO are morally justified not just temporarily but indefinitely. Instead of donating vaccines to address the current vaccine scarcity, the US and wealthy countries must pressure the WTO and top drug makers to share their property rights and patents to their vaccines to protect the common good and attain a just and moral vaccine distribution system.
The author declares that he has no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced him in writing this article.
V.O.B. is the sole author of this article.
This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any affiliated agency of the author.