The companies have sold the vast majority of their doses to
rich countries, leaving low-income nations in the lurch, said the People’s
Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to Covid
vaccines, which based its calculations on the firms’ own earning reports.
The Alliance estimates that the trio will make pre-tax
profits of $34 billion this year between them, which works out to over $1,000 a
second, $65,000 a minute or $93.5 million a day.
“It is obscene that just a few companies are making millions
of dollars in profit every single hour, while just two percent of people in
low-income countries have been fully vaccinated against coronavirus,” Maaza
Seyoum of the African Alliance and People’s Vaccine Alliance Africa said.
“Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have used their monopolies to
prioritise the most profitable contracts with the richest governments, leaving
low-income countries out in the cold.”
Pfizer and BioNTech have delivered less than one percent of
their total supplies to low-income countries while Moderna has delivered just
0.2 percent, the PVA said.
Currently, 98 percent of people in low-income countries have
not been fully vaccinated.
The three companies’ actions are in contrast to AstraZeneca
and Johnson & Johnson, which provided their vaccines on a not-for-profit
basis, though both have announced they foresee ending this arrangement in the
future as the pandemic winds down.
PVA said that despite receiving public funding of more than
$8 billion, Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna have refused calls to transfer vaccine
technology to producers in low- and middle-income countries via the World
Health Organization, “a move that could increase global supply, drive down
prices and save millions of lives.”
“In Moderna’s case, this is despite explicit pressure from
the White House and requests from the WHO that the company collaborate in and
help accelerate its plan to replicate the Moderna vaccine for wider production
at its mRNA hub in South Africa,” the group said.
While Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla has dismissed technology
transfer as “dangerous nonsense,” the WHO’s decision to grant emergency use
approval to the Indian-developed Covaxin earlier this month proves that
developing countries have the capacity and expertise, PVA added.
PVA, whose 80 members include the African Alliance, Global
Justice Now, Oxfam, and UNAIDS, is calling for pharmaceutical corporations to
immediately suspend intellectual property rights for COVID vaccines by agreeing
to a proposed waiver of the World Trade Organisation’s TRIPS agreement.
More than 100 nations, including the United States, back
that move, but it is being blocked by rich countries including the UK and
Germany. -AFP
0 comments:
Post a Comment