“Ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a very different mindset—a mindset that puts people over profits at every turn.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Wednesday urged President Joe Biden to support an India and South Africa-led effort at the World Trade Organization to temporarily suspend coronavirus vaccine-related intellectual property rights in order to facilitate speedy global production and distribution of the life-saving shots—a proposal backed by nearly 70% of U.S. adults and more than 100 nations worldwide.
“It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere, including in the Global South,” Sanders said in a video released Wednesday as part of a global virtual “Rally for a People’s Vaccine.”
In order to ramp up coronavirus vaccine production to meet the global need and distribute doses “as quickly as humanly possible,” Sanders said, “The United States should play a major role in promoting global cooperation and innovation.” At present, the U.S.—along with other wealthy nations where major pharmaceutical companies are based—is blocking India and South Africa’s push for a patent waiver, which industry lobbying groups are mobilizing to crush.
“Our government has invested enormous sums of taxpayer dollars into the production of these technologies. All people should benefit, not just a few already obscenely wealthy CEOs and shareholders in the wealthiest country on Earth,” said the Vermont senator. “We need a People’s Vaccine, not a Profit Vaccine.”
Less than a week after the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a leading industry lobbying organization, called on Biden to uphold U.S. opposition to the patent-waiver proposal, Sanders said Wednesday that he is sending a letter to the president demanding his support for the plan “so that we can rapidly expand supplies of vaccines” without the constraints imposed by pharma monopolies.
“Ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a very different mindset—a mindset that puts people over profits at every turn,” Sanders said. “The pharmaceutical companies must not block this effort, and I join you in your request to temporarily waive WTO intellectual property protections on Covid-19 medical technologies during the pandemic.”
Sanders’ remarks came ahead of a global “Free the Vaccine” day of action Thursday wherein medical professionals, scientists, and progressive activists are planning to rally at Moderna headquarters in Massachusetts, PhRMA headquarters in Washington, D.C., Pfizer headquarters in New York City, and other locations to pressure Biden to support the proposed intellectual property waiver. A WTO council is meeting to discuss the proposal this week.
Without ambitious action to free vaccine recipes from the pharmaceutical industry’s stranglehold, activists and experts have warned, most poor nations will not achieve sufficient inoculation against the deadly virus until as late as 2024 as rich countries continue to hoard much of the existing supply.
According to a new analysis by the International Rescue Committee, excess vaccine doses bought up by the U.S., United Kingdom, and European Union could inoculate every adult in Yemen, Ethiopia, and other nations facing horrific humanitarian crises.
“Around the world, two and a half million lives have already been lost due to this brutal disease and many countries are battling without adequate medical care and no vaccines,” Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International, said in a statement Wednesday. “By allowing a small group of pharmaceutical companies to decide who lives and who dies, rich nations are prolonging this unprecedented global health emergency and putting countless more lives on the line.”
“At this crucial time,” said Bucher, “developing countries need support—not opposition.”
This article was written by Jake Johnson and republished from Common Dreams 11 March 2021 under Creative Commons license. Click here to read the original article.
Common Dreams is a nonprofit, US-based news website that declares itself as serving the progressive community. It publishes news stories, editorials, and a newswire of current, breaking news.
Comments
4 responses to “‘We need a people’s vaccine, not a profit vaccine’: Sanders urges Biden to support push to suspend Pharma patents”
Is there any doubt about who the good and the bad guys are in this story?
it will never happen as our society is based on a few owning it all and compassion does not come into it.
Asking Big Pharma not to profiteer is like asking Rupert Murdoch to donate $1 billion to help the poor. Or asking a crab to walk straight. Ain’t gonna happen!
Once again the U.S. seems to be shooting itself in the foot. While it insists on retaining patent rights on its vaccines and thereby pricing it’s product out of reach of many developing countries, China is reportedly already supplying it’s vaccines to 12 Latin American and Caribbean countries and to 35 African countries. I suspect that this is an incomplete list of where China is seizing the initiative in fighting the Covid pandemic around the world.
Also, Russia is reportedly providing vaccine relief to Europe, and would do more but for the intransigence of Brussels.
By demonising Russia and China instead of cooperating with them in a global effort to counter the Covid scourge, the U.S. is giving both Russia and China the inside running in the entirely unnecessary and manufactured zero-sum race to gain the respect of the rest of the world. Can they really not see that they are empowering those they have designated their competitors if not outright enemies, that their influence is slipping through their greedy fingers, that they will soon find themselves on the outside of a new global paradigm looking in?
The short-sighted and self-defeating hubris of the U.S. is simply astonishing.