Vaccines are too important to be left to Big Pharma

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Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
Written by editor
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Dear friend,

If there is one lesson from the pandemic that nearly everyone should be able to agree on, it’s this: vaccines are too important to be left in the hands of Big Pharma.

That’s the thrust of a parliamentary petition calling on the Trudeau government to allow low-cost versions of COVID-19 vaccines, as well as tests and treatments, to be produced for export to lower-income countries. The petition was launched by Common Frontiers and is supported by the Council of Canadians.

SIGN THE PETITION

International trade agreements like the World Trade Organization’s Agreement on Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) have given companies like Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson globe-spanning monopolies over COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, which they’ve used to engage in profiteering on a scale never before seen.

Canada has legislation on the books that, in principle, should allow Canadian generic pharmaceutical companies to partially get around Big Pharma’s vaccine monopoly. Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR) was created in the context of the AIDS epidemic in the early 2000s to allow Canadian manufacturers to produce cheaper versions of expensive, patented medicines for export to lower-income countries.

Adding COVID-19 vaccines and treatments to the list of medicines that can be exported under CAMR (known as ‘Schedule 1’) would seem like a no-brainer. That was the conclusion that the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs came to, calling on the Trudeau government to “immediately” amend the Schedule 1 list “so that generic versions can be exported to developing countries under the Canada’s Access to Medicines Regime (CAMR).”

And yet, when a St. Catharines Ont.-based companies tried to use this mechanism to produce vaccines for export, all it got was the runaround from the bureaucrats responsible for CAMR. Big Pharma lobbied intensively against any weakening of their control, and so a modern facility capable of producing up to 20 million doses of vaccines per year has gone unused in the fight against COVID-19.

Access to vaccines and other COVID-19 tools is likely to only get worse as time goes on. As newer, bivalent vaccines are developed to deal with an elusive, ever-evolving virus, Moderna and Pfizer have announced eye-watering price increases – on the order of 400% - for their updated vaccines. Great news for these companies’ shareholders, not so great news for everyone else.

SIGN THE PETITION

The petition will push the government to finally give a straight answer to the company, and to all of us who don’t see any reason why global public health should be sacrificed for the interests of Big Pharma’s profits.

Thank you,

Nik Barry-Shaw (he/him)
Trade and Privatization Campaigner
The Council of Canadians

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