3 minute read
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. 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. 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. 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
Supporting the global pool
here: globaljustice.org.uk/ctap
AstraZeneca and Oxford Uni
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.
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
now trying to arrange a meeting with the AstraZenca CEO and people who have had Covid-19 or people who have lost relatives to Covid-19. We are hoping to use this meeting or the refusal of a meeting as part of our media strategy.
If you have had Covid-19 or have lost relatives to Covid-19 and would like to be involved in this meeting, please can you email: heidi.chow@globaljustice.org.uk
We’re also expecting to ask groups and supporters to help put pressure on AstraZeneca later this year.
The People’s Vaccine
We have recently joined the People’s Vaccine global alliance. This is an informal coalition of organisations and individuals building pressure for an effective vaccine based on shared knowledge which is freely available to everyone everywhere. Members of the alliance include Oxfam, UNAIDS and Médecins Sans Frontières.
We are hoping that this global collaboration will help to multiply the demands of our campaign across the world to put pressure on national and international decision makers.
In collaboration with this coalition, we helped to co-ordinate a global open letter from Covid-19 survivors, people who are in high risk groups and those who have lost relatives to coincide with the UN General Assembly. The letter is addressed to the pharmaceutical industry and calls on pharmaceutical companies to support and join C-TAP. The letter got 942 signatories from 57 countries.
Getting the word out
We haven’t produced any physical resources for campaigning around Covid-19 vaccines and treatments so far because of the relatively few stalls being done. However, this doesn’t mean there’re nothing groups can do. Our senior campaigner Heidi Chow
is very happy to speak at online group
meetings. Email her to set something up, heidi.chow@globaljustice.org.uk, or contact the activism team for help with setting up an onlne meeting. You can get hold of us via activism@globaljustice.org.uk or leave a message with someone on our main number, 020 7820 4900, and we’ll call you back.
Key resources
A Covid-19 vaccine should be
affordable for all Four-page briefing (March 2020).
Letter calling on the government to support the Covid-19 vaccines pool.
