People’s Vaccine campaign
© Jess Hurd
At Labour party conference in Brighton: We held a successful fringe meeting on Labour’s policy with shadow development secretary Preet Gill, plus a People’s Vaccine rally at The World Transformed.
Vaccine apartheid
As rich countries start to roll out booster shots this autumn, the modest WHO goal of vaccinating 10% of the population of every nation by the end of September was not met. It looks unlikely that the WHO’s call for a 40% global vaccination rate by the end of 2021 will be achieved either. Of the 4.8 billion vaccine doses delivered to date globally, 75% have gone to only 10 countries, while vaccine coverage in Africa is at less than 2%. Latest data shows that the G7 countries combined have enough surplus vaccines to redistribute 500m doses by the end of September, and up to 1.2bn doses by the end of the year. Yet Covax, the biggest buyer of vaccines and supplier of them to poorer countries, has struggled to get hold of the doses it has bought and has shipped only 303m this year. Even as production ramps up, global health inequality deepens. And of course, healthcare systems in poorer countries are overwhelmed and under resourced not just with vaccines but also 8 October 2021
medication, oxygen, protective gear – all this would be covered under the temporary IP suspension proposed by the TRIPS waiver.
The TRIPS waiver
It is now a whole year since South Africa and India proposed a temporary waiver of Covid-related patents to the World Trade Organisation’s intellectual property body, the TRIPS Council. Over 100 countries in the global south supported the proposal at the time, and since then some rich countries including the US, France and Australia have done so too. But the UK, Germany, Norway and Switzerland in particular continue to block it. On 22 September, President Biden convened a virtual Covid-19 Summit where he pledged an additional 500 million vaccine doses in donations, but failed to put pressure on pharmaceutical companies to share their technologies for expanded production. Boris Johnson did not even attend the summit.
