Fueling Human Rights Crisis

Big pharma are the big winners of the current pandemic. At the same time when their shares skyrocket, low-income countries remain largely unvaccinated.

Big pharma executives and shareholders saw their wealth skyrocket in the week after the Omicron variant was discovered. Eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders added over $10 billion to their fortunes.

Pharma executives are accused of “making a killing from a crisis they helped to create.” Vaccine inequality is very real, creating right conditions for the Omicron variant to emerge.

Campaigners are calling on governments to support a waiver of intellectual property rules on Covid-19 vaccines and treatments to allow low and middle-income countries to manufacture jabs for themselves, breaking big pharma monopolies and increasing overall supplies.

Just 6% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated, while pharmaceutical companies sell booster jabs to rich nations. The ten Southern African countries on the UK’s travel red list, where it is suspected that Omicron may have emerged, have a combined vaccination rate of just 14% (Our World in Data).

Amnesty International has accused pharmaceutical companies of “fuelling an unprecedented human rights crisis” by refusing to waive intellectual property rights and share vaccine technology. Human rights lawyers are also preparing action against governments who have blocked an intellectual property waiver.

For more than a year, South Africa has led calls from low and middle-income countries to temporarily waive intellectual property rights on Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments, to allow wider manufacturing and more equitable access to medical technologies.

A waiver is supported by the WHO and the governments of most countries, including the United States. But the UK and EU, driven by Germany, have blocked the measure from progressing at the World Trade Organization.

In May of 2020, the WHO set up its Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), a program to facilitate the transfer of vaccine technology and know-how to accredited manufacturers. But big pharmaceutical companies have boycotted the scheme, which Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla dismissed as “nonsense”.

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