Hi John,
The majority of us fear what the emergence of the Omicron variant might mean for our health and our livelihoods. But while we've been worrying about the future, eight Pfizer and Moderna shareholders laughed all the way to the bank as their combined wealth rose by $10.31 billion in just one week.
Pharmaceutical executives are making a killing from a crisis they helped to create, with vaccine inequality increasing the likelihood of new variants like Omicron emerging. And unless we deal with it urgently, vaccine inequality will deepen injustice and poverty for generations to come.
There is nothing inevitable about vaccine inequality. The supplies of Covid-19 vaccines aren’t limited because we lack the ability to produce more of them, but because big pharmaceutical companies and a handful of governments are blocking steps to produce vaccines faster.
The clearest way out of the pandemic is for countries in the global south to be able to produce vaccines for themselves. It’s now over a year since the governments of South Africa and India proposed waiving the patents on all Covid-19 vaccines. But the UK government is one of the handful standing in the way of this proposal to allow vaccine factories across the world to start producing.
We urgently need to take this campaign to another level - and we need your help. We’re planning to turn up the heat on the worst big pharma companies, whose greed is prolonging this pandemic for millions of people whilst a few executives become billionaires, and on Boris Johnson blocking the proposal.
Will you help the campaign into its next phase by donating £5 today?
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Rich government and big pharma pledges make flattering headlines, but distract from the real solutions
The facts paint a dire picture. While we in Britain have given vaccines to everyone who wants one, the whole African continent has only vaccinated 6% of its population.
To cover his own back, Boris Johnson claims the UK is donating vaccines. But the government has given miniscule amounts, with many of those close to expiration. They represent only a tiny fraction of the excess doses the UK has ordered. In fact, the government’s lack of concern about global access led them to throw away 600,000 expired doses in August.
And while a global pandemic is raging, big pharma companies are propping up their monopolies. Research shows that Moderna, Pfizer and BioNTech are making $1,000 profit every second.
Our demand for a waiver would allow countries to override corporate monopolies and ramp up production of vaccines. Our movement has support from thousands of people from across the globe including the Pope, dozens of former world leaders, Nobel laureates – and even the president of the USA.
Now is the time to scale up our campaigning efforts and go further by demanding large pharmaceutical companies share their vaccine technology and know-how, to maximise global vaccine production and continue to build public pressure on the UK government to support the waiver. Will you donate today to make this happen?
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Together we can make sure everyone, everywhere has access to a Covid-19 vaccine
But I have hope - the movement we’ve built is extraordinary. Together, we have made this a mainstream political demand. We have forced the pharma companies to stop exporting vaccines from countries which have too few vaccines to those already overloaded with doses. And now a factory backed by the World Health Organisation in South Africa is starting to mimic the Moderna vaccine so it can share the recipe with the world.
Just on Tuesday this week Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, gave her support to our campaign for a People’s Vaccine in the Scottish parliament, and to the global call for a waiver on patents for vaccines. This is a big win for our campaign.
What we’re working on here is not providing a few more donations – that will never be enough. What we’re fighting for is the right of governments of the global south to have control over their own medicines, rather than be dependent on a free trade system which has so badly failed them.
We cannot allow big corporations and governments to treat the majority of the world as disposable. Donate today and let us ramp up this work next year.
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In solidarity, and with my best wishes for the festive season
Tim Bierley,
Pharmaceuticals campaigner at Global Justice Now
P.S. I hope you'll be able to donate to strengthen our campaign for vaccine equality, to make sure the world can emerge from this pandemic as quickly as possible.
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