Colonial Legacies and Vaccine Equity: Pharmaceutical Companies as a Lens on International Law’s Reinforcement of Colonial Bias

This paper argues that today’s vaccine inequities are not market anomalies but predictable outputs of a juridical political economy forged in Empire and then constitutionalized through international economic law. Using five pharmaceutical conglomerates with colonial lineages—Wellcome/Burroughs Wellcome (now GSK), Bayer, Merck, and Rhône-Poulenc (now Sanofi)—as an analytic lens, it reconstructs how extraction, racially stratified experimentation, and monopoly privileges matured into treaty-backed exclusivities, culminating in the WTO TRIPS architecture and its TRIPS-plus extensions. It then demonstrates how COVID-19 functioned as a stress test, confirming that concentrated patent rights, guarded know-how, and licensing asymmetries translate into systematic under-provision for the Global South even amid unprecedented public financing. Against this backdrop, the paper maps a counter-trajectory of Southern agency—doctrinal filters against evergreening, compulsory/government-use licensing, waiver diplomacy, pooled procurement, South–South manufacturing, and technology-transfer hubs—treating these not as episodic workarounds but as a coherent decolonizing strategy. The prescriptive claim is forward-leaning: rebalancing requires structural reform—automatic public-health overrides in trade and investment law, binding and time-bound technology-transfer obligations in pandemic instruments, disciplined limits on data exclusivity and investor-state leverage, and reparative investment to build distributed manufacturing capacity. Without such redesign, “equity” remains rhetorical while the colonial logic of protection for capital over care persists.