You can help Ireland secure the last few signatures needed to reach a European Commission threshold in a campaign to urge the EU to allow the production of approved Covid-19 vaccines to competent and safe pharmaceutical facilities around the world.

The NoProfitOnPandemic petition is a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), which means the Commission is obliged to respond if enough signatures are collected. Its organisers say allowing developing countries to produced approved vaccines locally would make them freely available and accessible to all.

It wants action to ensure that intellectual property rights, including patents, do not hamper the accessibility or availability of any future Covid-19 vaccine or treatment. And it highlights the EU’s role in this, saying European legislation on data and market exclusivity should not be deployed to limit the rollout of licenses to produce vaccines across the globe.

TRIPS is an acronym for ‘trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights’. The TRIPS waiver would address vaccine inequity by temporarily waiving intellectual property rights to vaccines, and by encouraging pharmaceutical companies to share their know-how, allowing the manufacture of vaccines to be scaled up to meet global demand.

Half the world’s population remains unable to secure a vaccine against coronavirus and with the prospect for a new variant presenting or, with time, our own defences against this threat to humankind weakening, could bring us all back to the worst of times that so many now think behind us.

The threat remains real and we must not give up on those who need our help most. Whole populations, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, remain at great risk. 

Sign this European citizens’ initiative, and ensure that the European Commission does everything in its power to make anti-pandemic vaccines and treatments a global public good, freely accessible to everyone.

A private company shouldn’t have the power to decide who has access to treatments or vaccines and at what price. Patents provide one single company with the monopoly control over essential pharmaceutical products. This limits their availability and increases their cost to those who need them.

Please help ensure that Ireland plays it’s part in putting the case for a TRIPS Waiver to the European Commission.

The union’s general secretary Kevin Callinan also recently wrote to Ireland’s 11 MEPs urging them to support measures to give developing countries rapid access to Covid-19 vaccines. Kevin asked them to put pressure on the European Commission to support a waiver of intellectual property rights, which currently restrict the local manufacture of life-saving vaccines across the globe.

Fórsa says the EU’s refusal to back a TRIPS waiver – which was originally proposed by the governments of South Africa and India and is now supported by over 100 nations – puts millions of lives at risk in the developing world, while hindering efforts to control the spread of the virus everywhere, including Ireland and Europe.

Fórsa has been active in the international People’s Vaccine Campaign over the last two years. The campaign says pharmaceutical company control of vaccine-related intellectual property could leave countries in the global south waiting until 2023 for widespread vaccination.