Hi,
[ [link removed] ]Will you sign the petition opposing Bill Gates' efforts to stop mass
vaccine production worldwide?
The pandemic continues to worsen around the globe -- and thanks in part to
Bill Gates, countries can't get the vaccines they need.
Gates helped convince Oxford University to sell its covid vaccine to
AstraZeneca, rather than keep their original promise to give away the
rights to anyone to make the vaccine.^1 This is a major reason why most
countries around the world are unable to start vaccinating their
populations.
Now Gates is joining Big Pharma in an effort to block President Biden from
suspending the patents and allowing any country in the world to produce
vaccines -- desperately needed as countries like India suffer the worst
crisis of the pandemic.^2 Can you help urge Biden to do the right thing?
[ [link removed] ]Sign the petition: Demand that Biden use his executive authority to
suspend US vaccine patent laws and expedite vaccine production!
ADD YOUR NAME
Close to 130 countries—containing 2.5 billion people—are not yet able to
administer a single vaccine dose, thanks to patent rules that Gates
defends. India's second wave is at deadly new heights, with over 350,000
new cases a day and hospitals at crisis-level resource shortages. At this
rate, the timeline for getting low- and middle-income countries to herd
immunity has been pushed to 2024, at the earliest.^3
It comes as no surprise that Bill Gates is doing everything he can to
uphold patent laws even as the pandemic continues to decimate the poorest
countries—after all, it is through intellectual property protections that
Gates earned his status as the richest man in the world for two decades.^4
But President Biden can override Gates' profiteering and use executive
power to suspend Big Pharma's patents and free up any manufacturer in the
world to produce vaccines. This will allow much faster vaccination at a
global scale, which is essential to stopping this pandemic.
Gates is fervently committed to intellectual property rights—as well as
the illusion that intellectual property rights allow for a robust free
market in the pharmaceutical industry. But in reality, the industry has
long been run by a handful of monopolistic companies whose power is
largely dependent on upholding these stringent laws.
As long as current vaccine patent laws privilege the profits of
pharmaceutical executives over tackling a public health crisis, the end of
the pandemic remains well out of sight. That's why we urgently need to
call on Biden to invoke the ‘concurrent use license’ that would allow
vaccine manufacturing to happen at the scale we need.
Bill Gates has defended pharmaceutical monopolies since the worst
stretches of the AIDS crisis in the 1990s.^5 His views shouldn't override
public health needs.
[ [link removed] ]Sign the petition: President Biden must use his executive authority to
suspend vaccine patents to expedite vaccine production worldwide!
Thanks for taking action,
Tara and the team at Demand Progress
[ [link removed] ]DONATE
Sources:
1. Kaiser Health News, "They Pledged to Donate Rights to Their COVID
Vaccine, Then Sold Them to Pharma," [ [link removed] ]August 25, 2020.
2. Yahoo News, "COVID-19 vaccine formulas shouldn't be shared with India:
Bill Gates," [ [link removed] ]May 1, 2021.
3. World Health Organization, "WHO Director-General's opening remarks at
the media briefing on COVID-19," [ [link removed] ]February 5, 2021.
4. The New Republic, "Bill Gates, Vaccine Monster," [ [link removed] ]April 12, 2021.
5. Ibid.
----------
PAID FOR BY DEMAND PROGRESS (<a href="[link removed]">DemandProgress.org</a>) and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Contributions are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Join our online community on <b><a href="[link removed]">Facebook</a></b> or <b><a href="[link removed]">Twitter</a>.</b>
You can unsubscribe from this list at any time: [link removed]
