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Nearly One Million Reached : Yunus' petition reaches close to one million signatures, urging global leaders to put people ahead pharma patents

11 Dec, 2020

Fig: Nearly One Million Reached : Yunus' petition reaches close to one million signatures, urging global leaders to put people ahead pharma patents

Yunus Centre Press Release (11 December 2020)

Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus launched a call for Covid-19 vaccines to be declared a Common Good in June 2020, which has been joined by 24 other Nobel Laureates and 125 former Presidents, Prime Ministers, and eminent global figures. With the upcoming EU Council Meeting of the European Heads of State, The TRIPS Council, WTO General Council and the African Union meetings, nearly one million, that is 913,453 people as of December 11, 2020 have supported a petition initiated by Yunus and supported by Avaaz, to urge their governments and businesses to make Covid-19 vaccines and medical technologies available everywhere by sharing know how, and without barriers from intellectual property right restrictions.

The petition, circulated intensively around the world by Avaaz, is urging the pharmaceutical companies to voluntarily hand over intellectual property (IP) rights and know-how for the next great task facing humanity: getting those vaccines to everyone, everywhere, at the lowest cost possible, at the fastest possible time.

Yunus commented that countries in Europe and America have locked up most of the global supply of vaccines for their own populations, pushing lower income nations to the back of the queue. Under current mechanisms such as COVAX, which are commendable, there simply will not be enough vaccine doses to go around by the end of 2021. The Global North fails to listen to the urgent warning from Dr. Tedros, The Director-General of the World Health Organization “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”

Yunus further highlights that to meet the recent challenges, countries urgently need to ramp up diagnostics tools, get access to potentially effective treatments at the lowest cost, and vaccinate their most at-risk as rapidly as possible—such as healthcare providers and the elderly. For this reason, almost one hundred countries are supporting a proposal at the World Trade Organization this month to issue a broad-based general waiver on patents and other IP rights to all Covid-19 vaccines and medical technologies. South Africa, a country where the tragic history of lives needlessly lost to the HIV/Aids pandemic looms large, is a co-sponsor of the proposal. A binding agreement to allow the vaccine to be patent-free, could transform the situation dramatically by sending a clear message that the vaccine is a global common good.

The pledge from Yunus stresses the fact that there should not be a North-South divide on the core issue of saving human lives in countries where most of the global population lives. The time has come for G20 leaders to show that they mean every word when they say they will “spare no effort” to leave no one behind. They have to step up to support the WTO proposal.

Since his first Appeal in June, Yunus joined the People's Vaccine Alliance, and has been working with many global organizations such as UNAIDs, Oxfam and twenty other organizations, to reach out to the United Nations, government leaders, and decision makers. Yunus, along with other members of the Alliance, initiated a draft resolution for the UN General Assembly to declare Covid-19 vaccines a global common good.

Please find the petition here: https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/vaccine_common_good/?zLNlAfb)

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Nearly One Million Reached : Yunus' petition reaches close to one million signatures, urging global leaders to put people ahead pharma patents

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