Manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines are putting profit before lives, Amnesty International said yesterday as it demanded 2 billion doses for poorer nations by the end of the year.
The human rights group said in a new report that US President Joe Biden was expected to outline a pledge at the UN General Assembly to fully vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population by September next year.
“We need leaders like President Biden to put billions of doses on the table and deliver the goods, otherwise this is just another empty gesture and lives will continue to be lost,” Amnesty secretary-general Agnes Callamard said.
The group said that AstraZeneca, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer had all refused to share doses or technology to enable more of the world to get COVID-19 jabs.
Most people in the rich world have been inoculated, but parts of Latin America, Africa and Asia have plunged into renewed crises with “tens of thousands of preventable deaths every week,” Amnesty said.
Out of 5.76 billion doses administered worldwide, only 0.3 percent have gone to low-income countries, while more than 79 percent have gone to upper-middle and high-income countries, it said.
In letters sent to Amnesty, all of the companies pledged their support for human rights, but the report said their actions violated that commitment.
AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were selling their doses at cost price, it said.
However, the six companies had fought a bid by India and South Africa to waive vaccine-related intellectual property rights at the WTO, despite receiving hefty government support themselves.
Amnesty launched a new campaign that it said was backed by the WHO and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights “to hold states and big pharma to account.”
With 100 days to go till the end of the year, it said that the WHO’s target of vaccinating 40 percent of the population of low and lower-middle-income countries was at risk.
It demanded that richer countries redistribute “the hundreds of millions of excess doses currently sitting idle” and for vaccine developers to ensure that at least half of doses produced go to poorer countries.
“We’re calling on states and pharmaceutical companies to drastically change course and to do everything needed to deliver 2 billion vaccines to low and lower-middle-income countries starting now,” Callamard said.
“Profits should never come before lives,” she said. “No one should spend another year suffering and living in fear.”
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