The current health crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic has turned many countries, especially the poorest ones, into “hostages” of pharmaceutical companies, which impose prices, dose delivery times and even demand legal immunity, today denounced a conference representatives of the press of various NGOs.
“Many Latin American governments, for example, are at the mercy of pharmaceutical companies and are forced to accept any condition,” said Felipe, coordinator of the Campaign for Access to Essential Medicines for Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Brazil. Carvalho.
Human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan of the Health Justice Initiative added that these countries “must accept limited distribution, artificially created shortages, pay the prices they charge and, in addition, allow secrecy and agreements.” exempt from liability “.
De Carvalho pointed out that this situation meant that in countries such as Brazil or Mexico, vaccination campaigns had to be stopped due to lack of doses, that the Brazilian government paid higher prices than its European counterparts for AstraZeneca vaccines or that pharmaceutical companies had asked Argentina to change its laws in exchange for distributing vaccines.
This, they warned, is happening in regions with some of the highest COVID-19 death rates on the planet, such as Latin America or Africa, where many health networks and hospitals are collapsing and many workers in The depleted sector has no prospect of being vaccinated in the short term.
Activists have drawn this black image to defend the approval in the World Trade Organization (WTO) of an initiative presented by India and South Africa to suspend patents for vaccines and other products to combat COVID-19, so that they can be manufactured freely.
The initiative, which will be debated again at the WTO next week, is backed by many developing countries, but faces opposition from economies where many of the major pharmaceuticals are based (United States, European Union, United Kingdom). , Japan, Switzerland, etc.).
“We do not understand why there should be a monopoly on the products needed globally, why we should limit the distribution of vaccines and why fundamental technologies should be exclusively exclusive,” De Carvalho told a news conference with the Association of Correspondents of the Nations. United (ACANU).
Pharmaceutical companies say they need to recoup the million-dollar investment they have made in research on vaccine vaccines, although NGO representatives have said much of the money has been received from public subsidies.
“They let them monopolize the benefits when they got more than $ 93,000 million from different governments, I don’t know why they need it anymore,” said KMGopakumar of Network World Third.
The MSF representative assured that governments have invested more than twice as much money as pharmaceutical companies in vaccines, treatments and other tools against the pandemic and stressed that these companies avoid disclosing exact figures on their research funds “because if they did this, we do see are not the main factors of innovation. “
Activists also recalled that many countries depend on international donations of vaccine vaccines organized by the COVAX network (supported by the World Health Organization) to reach their doses, but that even this humanitarian arm has less bargaining power than other countries. richer.
“In Latin America, many countries have sent money to COVAX, but they do not yet have information on when they will receive doses, what quantities or at what price,” he lamented de Carvalho.