Hi John,
The relief was all over social media following the news: ‘We’re going to have a vaccine’. There is light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. And I felt it too. But my next thought was: who’s going to get it?
It turns out that for billions of people around the world, they’re not going to have a vaccine – certainly not soon, and maybe not ever. Because US pharma giant Pfizer’s primary objective is to profit.
The company has announced that its vaccine candidate, produced jointly with German company BioNTech, is 90% effective in early trials. It says it has the capacity to produce the two required doses for 675 million people by the end of next year. But rather than distribute them around the world according to need, rich countries have already bought up most of the doses.
The obvious answer is to bring together the world’s resources to produce more of the vaccine as fast as possible – but Pfizer has exclusive rights to make this vaccine with no signs of sharing it. The World Health Organisation has a plan, a ‘global pool’ that allows companies and governments to collaborate to scale up production to tackle this global health emergency. Yet in May, Pfizer dismissed the WHO plan as “nonsense”. Meanwhile, on Monday the value of its shares went up by 11%.
John, in this global pandemic, we need global cooperation, not corporate greed. Can you email Pfizer now and ask them to share this vaccine with the world?
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