Today negotiations have resumed on the Pandemic Treaty in Geneva, and it is due to be finalised in the coming weeks. This treaty should make sure the lessons of the pandemic are learnt, and we never again allow Big Pharma to dictate who gets to produce and purchase life-saving medicines in the middle of a global health crisis.
During the pandemic, massive pharmaceutical corporations monopolised vaccine know-how, even though those medicines would never have existed without massive public investment.
Big Pharma monopolies allowed corporations like Pfizer and Moderna to make astronomical profits. But they prevented the world from producing enough medicines for everyone, as the corporations refused to share the knowledge behind the vaccines with countries that could have produced their own.
In turn, this created a vaccine apartheid, where the richest bought more vaccines than they needed, while even frontline health workers in poorer countries went without. A study for the journal Nature found that more than 1 million lives might have been saved if vaccines had been shared more equitably with lower-income countries in 2021.
The Pandemic Treaty should be about making sure this never happens again. It could create legal obligations so that, in future health crises, corporations are forced to share vital know-how so that countries in the global south are able to produce what they need. This is what many global south countries have been arguing for in months of negotiations. But shamefully, Britain has fought against these measures.
We’re now in the final stages of negotiation. Over the next few weeks we should see a final agreement emerge. Please take action today to make sure the British government doesn’t scupper the Pandemic Treaty we need.
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