A Crucial Turning Point in the Fight for a Peoples Vaccine
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
- Written by editor
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Dear friend,
The global fight for a People’s Vaccine is at a crucial turning point.
After 18 months of deadlock, negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) over lifting intellectual property rights for vaccines and other essential medicines have suddenly started to move fast. But the details of a leaked tentative agreement on patents show that the EU and other defenders of Big Pharma are trying to pull a quick one on the rest of the world by passing an agreement so riddled with caveats, exceptions and conditions that it won’t do much to improve the situation.
The Council of Canadians and its allies are urging the Trudeau government to start pushing for a real solution to the vaccine inequality caused by Big Pharma’s monopoly over these life-saving medicines. Members of Parliament must press Trudeau to support a comprehensive lifting of patents and other intellectual property rules. Send a letter to your MP In a letter sent to International Trade Minister Mary Ng and Minister of Innovation François-Philippe Champagne, the Council and its allies warn that going forward with such a flawed agreement would not meaningfully improve access to vaccines around the world. Indeed, we would be repeating the same errors made early on in the pandemic:
"Under WTO-enforced intellectual property rules, a few pharmaceutical companies control the supplies and prices of lifesaving COVID-19–related products and have sold most vaccines and treatments to rich countries, making tens of billions in revenue from products developed with government funding. The waiver compromise, by not including treatments and diagnostics, could allow similar situations to unfold with respect to life-saving treatments.”
Click here to read the full letter to Ministers Ng and Champagne.
The one bright spot of the draft agreement is that the EU has finally acknowledged the need to lift intellectual property rules to fight the pandemic. Only solidarity, in the form of compulsory technology transfer, can defeat the virus. We can't count on vaccine makers' benevolence or rich countries' empty promises to make vaccines and other treatments accessible and affordable to all, that much is obvious by now. Canada, however, continues to question the necessity of challenging Big Pharma’s vaccine monopoly. It is still failing to see the problem with a world where over 2.8 billion people have yet to get their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Parliamentarians in the EU, the UK, and around the world have joined their voices with that of the People’s Vaccine movement in denouncing the draft agreement. Canada’s Members of Parliament urgently need to do the same, as 71 MPs did in May 2021.
In solidarity,
Nik Barry-Shaw
Trade and Privatization Campaigner
The Council of Canadian
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