California: Meghan Markle and Prince Harry are among 130 signatories of an open letter condemning the UK government's refusal to lift intellectual property rules allowing mass manufacturing of Covid-19 vaccines, tests and treatments.
The letter by the People's Vaccine Alliance, a group working for vaccines to be made available free to everyone, called the current approach by world governments "immoral, entirely self-defeating and also an ethical, economic and epidemiological failure, Newsweek reported. The letter read: "The European Union, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland continue to block the lifting of intellectual property rules which would enable the redistribution and scale-up of Covid-19 vaccines, test and treatment manufacturing in the global south.
"The transfer of largely publicly funded vaccine technology and know-how from pharmaceutical corporations would fast track production to a matter of months. Yet still today, a handful of these corporations retain the power to dictate vaccine supply, distribution and price – and the power to decide who lives and who dies." According to Newsweek, the People's Vaccine
Alliance urged the governments to take five urgent steps to end the unfair distribution of vaccines including implementing a global roadmap to achieve WHO's goal of fully vaccinating 70 per cent of the world's population by mid-2022, and suspending all intellectual property rights rules in relation to COVID-19 drugs to allow for a global pooling of knowledge. The letter was signed to mark the second anniversary of the WHO's announcing outbreak of Covid-19. The other signatories include actress Charlize Theron, a UN "Messenger of Peace", three Nobel prize winners and many former presidents and prime ministers, including former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. (UNI)
