Access to medicine
Above and right: Students from Universities Alliied for Essential Medicines on a ‘carnival protest’ around central London universities to demand a patent-free coronavirus vaccine.
Our pharmaceuticals campaign continues to focus on the urgent issue of securing access to treatments, testing and any vaccines that are developed for Covid-19 for people globally. In particular we are working with allies to demand vaccine justice for the global south.
The UK government has not joined this pool and so we have updated our e-action to build up public pressure on the UK government to join, coinciding with the WHO appeal to governments to support it. If you haven’t taken the action yet, you can find it here: globaljustice.org.uk/ctap
Supporting the global pool
AstraZeneca and Oxford Uni
So far only 40 countries have joined, but the WHO is now promoting the C-TAP to governments. This pool will help to prevent corporate monopolies, expand manufacturing capacity and ensure affordable prices for all countries.
We wrote an open letter to AstraZeneca in May and we received a response which did not address our concerns or demands. Working with our ally Just Treatment, we are
In May, the World Health Organisation launched a global pooling mechanism. Proposed by Costa Rica, the Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) provides a global platform to facilitate open sharing of knowledge, data and intellectual property for all Covid-19 health tools. This will enable all countries to openly access treatments and vaccines needed to save lives.
8 October 2020
A lot of public money has been pumped into the well-publicised vaccine development collaboration between AstraZeneca and Oxford University. Yet the deal they signed remains secret, and it isn’t clear whether AstraZeneca will have exclusive control over the vaccine once developed. We are not only demanding transparency, but also that the company share the vaccine with C-TAP to enable other manufacturers to make it and maximise global production.
