peoples vaccine

Today, the European Commission published its EU Global Health Strategy. This document sets out the EU’s global vision for funding and international cooperation in relation to health.

Rich countries have secured almost three times as many courses of a World Health Organisation (WHO)-recommended COVID-19 medicine, Pfizer’s Paxlovid, according to new analysis from Oxfam and the People’s Vaccine Alliance.

World leaders have not done enough to achieve their goal of vaccinating 70% of people in each country by September, campaigners with the People’s Vaccine Alliance warned ahead of the second virtual summit on COVID-19 hosted by US President Biden along with Belize, Germany, Indonesia, and Senegal. The World Health Organization’s target of reaching 70% by mid-year is even further out of reach.

The European Parliament has supported an amendment calling for Europe to support the temporary suspension of intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines, tests, and treatments. In reaction to this vote, Evelien van Roemburg, head of Oxfam EU office, said: "This vote sends a strong signal that Europeans stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of the world in the fight against the pandemic."

Responding to news that governments at the World Trade Organization (WTO) have agreed a deal on patents for COVID-19 vaccines in developing countries, Max Lawson, Co-Chair of the People’s Vaccine Alliance and Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam, said: “This is absolutely not the broad intellectual property waiver the world desperately needs to ensure access to vaccines and treatments for everyone, everywhere.

In response to the commitments made at President Biden’s Second COVID-19 Summit today, especially the licensing of publicly owned medical technologies, such as the stabilized spike protein for use by the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) through the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), Robbie Silverman, Oxfam America’s Senior Manager of Private Sector Advocacy, made the following statement:

Responding to the WTO’s published ‘outcome’ of negotiations over a waiver of Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS), Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy for Oxfam and co-chair of the People's Vaccine Alliance, said: "This text is a recognition that WTO rules on intellectual property are a clear barrier to ensuring people get the vaccines, tests, and treatments they need. It is a tragedy that it has taken almost two years and millions of deaths to reach this point and a travesty that the action proposed today falls well short of what is needed."

In response to reports of a potential compromise agreed by the EU, South Africa, India and the US for a waiver of intellectual property rules for COVID vaccines, Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy for Oxfam and co-chair of the People's Vaccine Alliance, said: 
 

An article in the British Medical Journal and Die Welt, published today, has found that the KenUP Foundation - acting as a consultant on behalf of BioNTech – has been pushing South African manufacturers not to get involved the World Health Organization Vaccine Technology Transfer Hub’s project of copying the manufacturing process of existing mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and have been calling for the project to be ‘terminated immediately’. 

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.