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Hi,
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?
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.
Thanks for taking action,
Tara and the team at Demand Progress
Sources:
1. Kaiser Health News, "They Pledged to Donate Rights to Their COVID Vaccine, Then Sold Them to Pharma," August 25, 2020.
2. Yahoo News, "COVID-19 vaccine formulas shouldn't be shared with India: Bill Gates," May 1, 2021.
3. World Health Organization, "WHO Director-General's opening remarks at the media briefing on COVID-19," February 5, 2021.
4. The New Republic, "Bill Gates, Vaccine Monster," April 12, 2021.
5. Ibid.
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