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The supply of safe and effective vaccines for all is being artificially rationed because of the protection of exclusive rights and monopolies of pharmaceutical corporations, the People’s Vaccine Alliance said today.

An international coalition of human rights law groups, public health experts, and civil society organisations is taking legal action against the US, UK, Germany, Norway, and Switzerland, on the grounds that these countries are in violation of international human rights law by failing to intervene on what has been an inequitable and racially discriminatory rollout of the vaccine and other COVID healthcare technologies.   

Responding to an International Labour Organisation’s report, ILO Monitor: COVID-19 and the world of work, campaigners have called global vaccine inequality “a collective act of social and economic self-harm”.

More than 170 former heads of state and government and Nobel laureates, including former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown, former President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of France François Hollande and Nobel Laureates Professor Joseph Stiglitz and Professor Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, today called on President Biden to support a waiver of intellectual property rules for COVID-19 vaccines and pursue a people’s vaccine to end the pandemic in an open letter today.

“We needed the World Health Assembly to unite behind a People’s Vaccine, not a Trump Administration seeking scapegoats for a pandemic it has mis-handled from the start", said Anna Marriott, Health Policy Manager at Oxfam, commenting at the closure of the World Health Assembly today.  

"The unprecedented global health crisis must be met with a vaccine plan that puts people ahead of the profits of big pharmaceutical companies," said Oxfam ahead of the Coronavirus Global Response Summit on Monday 4 May, which aims to raise $8 billion to develop vaccines, treatments and tests to help end the Covid-19 pandemic.

Vaccine equity campaigners have called news that Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer BioNTech will start building a vaccine production facility in Rwanda next year “far too little, far too late”.  The People’s Vaccine Alliance has also said that Moderna’s new commitment to produce 110 million doses for the African Union as “barely worth the paper it is written on” after the company failed to deliver promised vaccines to COVAX, calling on the US government to step in and mandate the company to commit to technology transfer.

“Moderna’s discovery could be a real game-changer in the fight against COVID-19. However, on its own, Moderna can only produce enough vaccine for less than seven percent of the global population by the end of 2021, almost all of whom will be in rich countries," said Anna Marriott, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager, in response to the announcement today from the National Institutes of Health that early data shows Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine is nearly 95 percent effective.

Commenting at the close of the EU council meeting where leaders agreed on a new EU 2030 climate target and discussed the EU’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Evelien van Roemburg, head of Oxfam’s EU advocacy office said: "The new, more ambitious, EU 2030 target still falls short of what is needed and what is fair. The EU must take urgent practical steps to deliver above and beyond this target."

Survivors of COVID-19 from 37 countries are among almost 1,000 people who have signed an open letter to pharmaceutical industry leaders calling for a ‘people's vaccine’ and treatments that are available to all – free from patents. The letter comes on the eve of a high-level side event about the pandemic at the UN General Assembly in New York.