A challenge to big pharma

Juman is a Just Treatment patient leader.

Juman taking part in the Day of Action

“If it were up to me, everyone would have the vaccine”.

Surprising words from an operator at one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.  Especially when it’s one of those holding the solution to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Or maybe not. After all, her life has probably been turned as upside down as mine or yours by the virus and lockdown. And she knows as well as we do how important the vaccine is to all of our lives and futures.

I was one of countless calls she took on the People’s Vaccine Day of Action. Many of us, from the UK to South Africa, Germany to the USA, have been calling and writing to Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca to demand that they join the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool. That’s vital if we’re to see enough vaccines manufactured and made accessible to enable the whole world to move past the pandemic. And it’s not a lot to ask given the billions of public money - our money - which has gone into helping these companies develop their vaccines in the first place. 

The alternative’s impossible to stomach. Like so many, I didn’t take the pandemic seriously until I saw the impacts directly: friends struggling to breathe and hospitalised; healthy people laughing and dancing one week, gone a few weeks later. And lockdown, we all know, does it’s own damage, from leaving families without a livelihood to impacting education and public services and increasing isolation. 

“COVID-19 was out of our control, but what happens with the vaccine is a choice.”

I’m one of the lucky ones. I happen to have been born in the UK, and as it’s at the front of the vaccine queue, the end’s in sight. But I could, just as easily, be living in a country which isn’t so well-placed. My family is from Iraq. I still have cousins there who risk living without a vaccine for years to come. Or what if you happen to live in Senegal or Bolivia, Yemen or the Democratic Republic of Congo? 

None of this should matter. COVID-19 was out of our control, but what happens with the vaccine is a choice. Companies can choose to make the vaccine available for widespread manufacture and accessible to every person in the world. Or they can choose to put their interests first, with closed door deals and patents, at the expense of more lives, more futures and more inequality. It may not be up to the operators besieged by all our calls, but it is up to their bosses, the CEOs of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. 

So Messers Bourla, Bancel and Soriot, what do you choose: will you ensure the whole world can access the Covid-19 vaccine or won’t you?