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	Save millions of lives by providing equal access to the COVID-19 vaccines by The People's Vaccine Alliance, agencies   Mar. 2023   Profiteering of Covid pandemic must never be repeated.   The Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former first lady of South Africa and Mozambique Graca Machel and former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon are among nearly 200 signatories to a letter calling on governments to “never again” allow “profiteering and nationalism” to come before the needs of humanity, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.   In a scathing open letter, current and former presidents and ministers, Nobel laureates, faith leaders, heads of civil society organisations and health experts say Covid-19 vaccines and treatments had been developed with public funding but that pharmaceutical companies had exploited them to “fuel extraordinary profits”.   Instead of distributing vaccines, tests and treatments based on need, companies sold doses to the “richest countries with the deepest pockets”, the letter says.   This inequity led to at least 1.3m preventable deaths worldwide – one every 24 seconds – in the first year of the Covid vaccine rollout alone, according to analysis based on a study published in the Lancet. “That those lives were not saved is a scar on the world’s conscience,” the letter continues.   Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand and co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response, established by the World Health Organization (WHO), said even though publicly funded science had contributed to the success of Covid-19 vaccines, they weren’t treated as global common goods.   “Rather, nationalism and profiteering around vaccines resulted in a catastrophic moral and public health failure which denied equitable access to all,” she said.   The letter, coordinated by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, comes on the third anniversary of the declaration by the WHO that the coronavirus outbreak had become a pandemic.   Former and current leaders of 40 countries, including the former president of Malawi Joyce Banda, President José Manuel Ramos-Horta of Timor-Leste, and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, are among the signatories, along with the archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Cecil Makgoba, and former heads of UN agencies.   Ramos-Horta said: “In the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us in low- and middle-income countries were pushed to the back of the line for vaccines and denied access to the benefits of new technologies. Three years on, we must say ‘never again’ to this injustice that has undermined the safety of people in every country.”   Signatories write that today, many low-income countries cannot access affordable treatments or tests. They say it is reminiscent of the response to the HIV and Aids epidemic, where millions died as expensive treatments were unaffordable for people in much of the world.   The letter urges world leaders to support a pandemic accord that is currently under negotiation at the WHO and treat publicly funded medicines as “global common goods … used to maximise the public benefit, not private profits”.   It calls for the removal of intellectual property barriers that prevent the sharing of scientific knowledge and technology and for governments to support and invest in research and development. It also calls on governments to provide support for the WHO’s mRNA hub, which is sharing vaccine technology with producers in 15 low- and middle-income countries.   “With these actions, world leaders can begin to fix the structural problems in global health that have held back the response to Covid-19, HIV and Aids, and other diseases,” says the letter. “It is time to embed justice, equity and human rights in pandemic preparedness and response. Only then can we truly turn the page on this chapter of history and say, ‘Never again.’”   http://bit.ly/3ZFQlRL http://peoplesvaccine.org/resources/media-releases/   Save millions of lives by providing equal access to the COVID-19 vaccines - The People's Vaccine Alliance   Our best chance of all staying safe is to ensure a COVID-19 vaccine is available for all as a global common good. This will only be possible with a transformation in how vaccines are produced and distributed — pharmaceutical corporations must allow the COVID-19 vaccines to be produced as widely as possible by sharing their knowledge free from patents.   Instead they are protecting their monopolies and putting up barriers to restrict production and drive up prices, leaving us all in danger. No one company can produce enough for the whole world. So long as vaccine solutions are kept under lock and key, there won’t be enough to go around. We need a People’s Vaccine, not a profit vaccine.   As you read this, governments and corporations are failing to make what should be the easiest possible choice: whether to save millions of lives by providing equal access to the COVID-19 vaccines.   Previously, the barrier to beating this cruel disease was science. Today it is inequality. We have the ability to vaccinate the world and to end this pandemic. But instead, rich countries are hoarding vaccines and protecting the profits of their pharmaceutical corporations instead of saving lives.   Insufficient vaccine supply combined with rich country hoarding of doses mean most people in developing countries faces this killer disease with minimal access to protection.   While public money funded the vaccine research, development and manufacturing, pharmaceutical corporations have a monopoly on how many doses are produced, who gets them and what price they pay. These corporations get to decide who lives and who dies.   This is entirely self-defeating. The virus is mutating all the time. The Omicron variant, which emerged in late 2021, has reduced the effectiveness of vaccines. Although vaccines continue to protect against severe disease and hospitalisation, there is no guarantee this will continue in the face of future variants. At the same time, the cost to the global economy of failing to vaccinate the world is estimated to be $9 trillion dollars.   Elected officials have the chance right now to end vaccine apartheid and save millions of lives.   HERE ARE THE FIVE STEPS THEY NEED TO TAKE TO MAKE A #PEOPLESVACCINE A REALITY:   Urgently agree and implement a global roadmap to deliver the WHO goal of fully vaccinating 70% of people by mid-2022. The roadmap should be based on a comprehensive global manufacturing and distribution plan for the vaccines and all COVID-19 products and technologies, fully funded with fair share financing from rich nations, and fair allocation of doses.   It must guarantee vaccines of sufficient number to fully vaccinate 70% of people in all countries by the mid-2022, including offering the vaccine to 100% of healthworkers in Low-Middle-Income Countries (LMICs), as well prioritising the most vulnerable and hard to reach groups.   Maximise the production of safe and effective vaccines and other COVID-19 products by suspending relevant intellectual property rules and ensuring the mandatory pooling of all COVID-19 related knowledge, data and technologies so that any nation can produce or buy sufficient and affordable doses of vaccines, treatments and tests.   Two key actions to take are:   1) Endorse and support the World Health Organisation COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP) and regional mRNA hubs, to facilitate sharing vaccine, tests and treatments technologies, know-how and intellectual property, and use all policy and legal tools available to compel pharmaceutical corporations to contribute to them.   2) Immediately support the proposal by India and South Africa at the World Trade Organisation to temporarily waive relevant intellectual property rules under the Agreement of Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) for COVID-19 vaccines and other technologies.   Invest public funding now in a rapid and massive increase in vaccine manufacturing as well as research and development (R&D) capacity to build a global distributed network capable of and governed to deliver affordable vaccines as global public goods to all nations. All countries must invest in the creation of regional R&D and manufacturing hubs with priority given to new capacity in developing countries.   The African Union for example has set a target that it will manufacture 60% of its own vaccines. This financing should be based on a systemof fair share burden sharing. This should include and build on the new innovations in vaccine technology supercharged by the pandemic such as mRNA, and guarantee the long-term public investment needed to develop and maintain the human capital and physical manufacturing infrastructure required to meet needs now and for future pandemics.   Due to the clear failure of the market alone in ensuring enough vaccines, governments   should retain sufficient ownership of these new facilities and work in partnership with the WHO, to ensure their strategic direction and output serves public interest first.   Ensure COVID-19 vaccines, treatments and tests are sold to governments and institutions at a price as close to the true cost as possible, provided free of charge to everyone, everywhere, and allocated according to need.   Vaccines are global public goods and must be provided free of charge to people. They must also be sold to all governments and international institutions at a price as close to the ‘true cost’ as possible.   Governments should use all policy and legal tools possible to drive down the price of vaccines, tests and treatments to reflect ‘true cost’ and public funding levels to maximise affordability and secure the lowest possible price. Any profiteering from the pandemic by Pharmaceutical firms should not be tolerated, and governments should act fast to apply punitive measures to any company that is found to be profiteering.   Vaccine distribution plans should follow the WHO Equitable Allocation Framework with priority given to frontline workers, people at risk and resource-poor countries with the least capacity to save lives.   Allocation plans should be in the public domain and open to consultation and scrutiny and include all people regardless of nationality, residency, or identity. Marginalised groups should be part of the national vaccination programmes including refugees, prisoners, people with disabilities and indigenous populations.   Rich countries must contribute a proportion of doses secured from bilateral deals to COVAX, free of charge and in adherence to the ‘Principles for sharing COVID-19 vaccine doses with COVAX’.   Scale up sustainable investment in public health systems. Governments should urgently scale up national and global financial support for upgrading and expanding public health systems especially primary health care and for the millions of additional health workers needed for a successful vaccine roll out and for delivering everybody’s right to health care. Health services should be free at the point of use, and all user fees eliminated.   Sustained financing of healthcare is urgently needed to ensure global security from emerging diseases and realise the goal of Universal Health Coverage and achieve the right to health for all.   We must use the experience of the pandemic to transform health systems across the world – resilient, universal and equitable health systems are a global public good needed to respond to emergencies but also to protect and save lives every day.   http://peoplesvaccine.org/resources/media-releases/moderna-vaccine-price-hike-would-be-4000-mark-up-above-cost/ http://peoplesvaccine.org/resources/media-releases/ http://theindependentpanel.org/ http://www.who.int/news/item/05-05-2022-14.9-million-excess-deaths-were-associated-with-the-covid-19-pandemic-in-2020-and-2021 http://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/nearly-30000-people-have-died-every-day-covid-19-wto-talks-vaccine-intellectual http://bit.ly/3MWejRB http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/06/un-expert-urges-states-end-vaccine-apartheid http://gcap.global/news/side-event-recording-available-covid-19-vaccine-inequality-and-social-protection-of-women-and-marginalised-communities/ http://gcap.global/covid-19/ http://www.cesr.org/the-right-to-health-vs-the-market-rejecting-the-false-dichotomy/   Jan. 2022   More action needed to ensure older people everywhere benefit from vaccines now. (HelpAge International)   As the WHO Executive Board meets for its 150th session, HelpAge has shared a statement calling on the WHO and Member States to do more to address the continuing inequity of global vaccine distribution which is exposing millions of those most in need to unnecessary risk.   “Almost three quarters of those who have died from COVID-19 are aged over 60 and yet millions remain unable to access the vaccines which would protect them from the virus. This is a shocking statistic and a salient reminder that not enough has been done by the international community to protect those most at risk,” said Camilla Williamson, HelpAge’s healthy ageing adviser.   Despite an estimated 52.2 million older people living in sub-Saharan Africa, available WHO data shows less than 5 per cent of older people were fully vaccinated in many countries by end of December 2021. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, less than 1 per cent of their 4.3 million are fully vaccinated.   The full statement submitted by HelpAge to the WHO reads as follows:   "Older people make up an estimated 73 per cent of mortality from COVID-19 globally. They should be at the centre of pandemic preparedness and response.   But vaccine inequity means less than 5 per cent of older people are vaccinated in many countries in Africa. In two of those countries, you are more likely to be vaccinated if you are under 60, than if you are older. This is ageism.   Vaccine inequity between countries must end now. We must also deliver equity within countries by reaching those most at risk first.   Older people’s rights must be upheld by addressing the barriers they face in accessing vaccines, including ageism, and by engaging and empowering all groups of older people in risk communication and community engagement activity. WHO has a wealth of technical capacity on ageing they must promote among actors at all levels to strengthen responses.   HelpAge is working with older people and partners in Africa and other regions to reach those most at risk. We call for concerted and urgent action from WHO, Member States and others to achieve vaccine equity and access for older people everywhere now.”   http://www.helpage.org/newsroom/latest-news/who-executive-board-meeting/   Dec. 2021   World Health Assembly pandemic treaty: Ensure those most at risk at centre of pandemic prevention and response   As the World Health Assembly convenes a special session to discuss the potential of developing a future WHO convention on pandemic preparedness, HelpAge International addressed the meeting to call for any response to address the risks faced by older people and to uphold their rights.   HelpAge’s global healthy ageing adviser, Camilla Williamson, spoke to the Assembly to call for those most at risk to be at the centre of pandemic preparedness and response. In her statement she said:   “Age discrimination has gone unsanctioned during COVID-19, as a result of the lack of explicit mention of age in international law on public health emergencies. Ageist responses have been a death sentence for many older people.   “Millions have also been rendered invisible by the failure to collect, report and use age, sex and disability disaggregated data.   “Vaccine apartheid means that many of those most at risk in low-income countries are still unvaccinated. And even where vaccines are becoming available, older people living in poverty, along with those who are socially or geographically isolated or excluded or living in insecure situations are being left behind.   “This inequity must end, and any future pandemic instrument must ensure it is never repeated. The use of age as a ground for discrimination must also be prohibited.”   HelpAge also called for measures which ensure inclusive approaches to preparedness and response be included in any future WHO instrument, highlighting that this can only be achieved by meaningfully engaging with different groups of older people.   This is only the second time in history that a special session of the World Health Assembly has been convened by the WHO and is an acknowledgement of the urgent need to develop a future convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response.   The full statement, which was submitted jointly by HelpAge and the IFA (International Federation on Ageing), to the World Health Assembly is as follows:   The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted in the most brutal ways the life and death consequences of infectious diseases, particularly for older age groups and other at-risk populations. During the first year of COVID-19, older people made up 84 per cent of mortality globally.   Those most at risk must be at the center of pandemic prevention and response. But during COVID-19 millions of older people have been left behind. Inequalities, discrimination, and ageism have led to violations of their human rights – including their right to health and their right to life.   The lack of explicit mention of age in international law on public health emergencies means age discrimination goes unsanctioned. Ageist responses have been a death sentence for many older people, while failure to collect, report and use age, sex and disability disaggregated data has left them invisible. A future pandemic treaty must end this.   It must prohibit the use of age as a ground for discrimination in pandemic responses and include measures to ensure all-of society approaches that meaningfully engage older people in building resilience to pandemics and in the design and delivery of responses.   Equity, as a principle and outcome, must guide the treaty. The inequity of the pandemic, which continues today in the vaccine apartheid, means we are in a situation where millions of those most at risk in low income countries, including older people, are still unvaccinated. Within countries, older people living in poverty and those who are socially and geographically isolated or excluded are most at risk of being left behind, including older women, older people with a disability or care need, older people from minority ethnic or religious groups, migrants and refugees, and those living in remote or insecure situations. This inequity must not be allowed to continue, and a future instrument must ensure it is never repeated.   http://www.helpage.org/newsroom/latest-news/world-health-assembly-must-ensure-those-most-at-risk-are-at-centre-of-pandemic-prevention-and-response/ http://www.helpage.org/what-we-do/coronavirus-covid19/covid19-vaccine/ Visit the related web page
	The threat that financial speculation poses to fundamental human rights by United Nations human rights experts   A group of independent United Nations human rights experts issued the following joint statement, in order to highlight the serious negative impact that financialisation has on the enjoyment of the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, as well as a range of other human rights, including the rights to food, adequate housing, development and a healthy and sustainable environment, among others.   The experts expressed their concern about the gradual encroachment of financial speculators into new domains, in particular trading in certain commodity derivatives that are essential for the enjoyment of human rights.   The experts pointed out that financialisation has a disproportionate impact on the enjoyment of their rights by women and girls who form half of the world population, and are systematically victims of discrimination. The impact on older people was also highlighted:   As pointed out by the former Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, in recent years massive amounts of global capital have been invested in housing as a commodity, as security for financial instruments that are traded on global markets, and as a means of accumulating wealth.   The 2008 global financial crisis, the effects of which still resonate today, was precisely triggered by the overconfidence of the financial services actors in mortgage-backed securities. When the financial housing bubble burst, many individuals and families, whose houses had suddenly lost much of their value, were made homeless overnight.   In the United States of America, there were an average of 10,000 foreclosures per day in 2008, and as many as 35 million persons were affected by evictions over a five-year period. In Spain, more than half a million foreclosures occurred between 2008 and 2013 resulting in over 300,000 evictions. There were almost 1 million foreclosures between 2009 and 2012 in Hungary.   In the Global South, financialisation is experienced differently - informal settlements in Southern cities are regularly demolished for luxury housing and commercial development such as shopping malls and other high-end services intended for the wealthiest groups of the population; a process of financialisation of development itself.   These financialisation trends have been reinforced during the Covid-19 pandemic. Firms such as Blackstone have aggressively entered into the purchase and grabbing of social housing, while playing a key role in triggering evictions.   Regarding the markets for agricultural commodities, with the deregulation of global financial markets at the end of the 20th century, and particularly after the adoption in the United States of the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, banks and institutional investors entered the food futures markets and identified them as a promising way to diversify their investment strategies.   While the above-mentioned real estate bubble was about to burst in 2008, the same big banks responsible for the global financial crisis invested billions of dollars in food futures, generating an increase in the prices of raw materials such as wheat, corn and soy-bean, which doubled and even tripled in a few months, in what was a new speculative bubble, this time in food.   As a result, in a very short time, according to the World Bank, between 130 million and 150 million more people were pushed into extreme poverty and hunger, mainly in low-income countries depending on food imports to feed their populations.   The financialisation of housing and food has exacerbated inequalities and exclusion, affecting disproportionately heavily indebted households and low-income earners.   Applying speculative logic to the management of assets that are essential for the life and dignity of people violates the human rights of people in poverty, exacerbates gender inequality and aggravates the vulnerability of marginalized communities. It also puts the economy off balance, replacing the logic based on supply and demand with a financial logic based on speculation.   The perverse impacts of this shift, as has been proven in the succession of speculative bubbles that have been generated and burst over the last decades, will contribute to destabilising rather than strengthening the global economy, which is still under the pressure of external debt and struggling to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.   For centuries, ecosystems and nature have been increasingly managed as property and commodities to be used and exploited by humans. Recent decades have seen the growing monetization and commodification of ecosystem services, such as carbon storage. This management approach threatens the sustainability of ecosystems, marginalizes natural and cultural values that have no apparent economic value, and weakens the control of indigenous peoples and local communities over their territories.   The right to pollute and destroy nature is legitimized and commercialized. As is happening with water, there is a serious risk that the commodification of ecosystems and nature will be exacerbated by financial speculation.   For example, addressing the climate emergency through weakly regulated futures markets on emissions and energy raw materials, could allow large banks and institutional investors to follow a strict profit-maximisation logic, ignoring both the impacts on people in poverty of pricing policies, and the, climate mitigation objectives, undermining human rights and the livelihoods of the poorest people.   Decisions made in distant boardrooms could result in the eviction of indigenous peoples from forests, their home for millennia, or the replacement of complex old growth forests with monocultures of fast-growing non-native tree species. On the other hand, this trend towards the "financialisation of nature" is one of the factors fuelling the growth of extractivism with its serious social and environmental impacts.   Recently, water futures were offered for trading on Wall Street futures markets under the pretence that speculative practices will help to better manage the expected water scarcity resulting from climate change by shaping prices in advance (known as "price discovery") and stabilising them. In fact, these are the very same arguments that justified the development of speculation in the food futures markets at the turn of the century.   However, far from stabilising prices, the aforementioned food bubble was triggered and price volatility soared, with disastrous consequences. The experience over the last two decades with the management of basic foodstuffs under the speculative logic of futures markets is a cautionary reminder to be taken into account on how speculation on goods essential for life such as food affects human rights.   Futures markets have traditionally been spaces in which contracts were negotiated between producers of raw materials and large traders and consumers, assuming commitments for the future. Although such markets often suffered from asymmetries and biases that perverted pricing, producers and traders were able to reduce the risks associated with price volatility.   However, everything changed when, at the end of the last century, financial actors such as investment funds and banks entered into these markets. The fact that these large corporations neither produce the goods nor have an interest in consuming or marketing them means that they only pursue short-term speculative objectives, in some cases manipulating the market thanks to their enormous financial power, leading their bets about future price increases to become self-fulfilling prophecies.   Under the force of these speculative strategies, they end up producing abusive price rises and speculative bubbles, ignoring the real signals of the market and ignoring, of course, the most basic needs of the most impoverished sectors and their human rights.   In 2010, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation. Beyond supplying ourselves with the water we need to drink, water and sanitation services are the basis for the hygiene we need to guarantee public health, as demonstrated by the vital role these services play today in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic.   On the other hand, just a few days ago, the UN Human Rights Council recognized the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. In fact, the lives of billions of impoverished people, families and communities depend on the good condition of rivers, wetlands, lakes and aquifers, not only for the supply of drinking water but also in the production of food through agriculture, livestock and fishing.   For all these reasons, water and aquatic ecosystems hold essential and even sacred values in indigenous worldviews that are related to the demands of today's sustainability paradigm. The benefits of safe, sufficient water and healthy aquatic ecosystems for all of humanity are incalculable.   Indeed, with the climate crisis becoming more and more evident, large sectors of humanity, and especially those living in poverty and marginalisation, depend more than ever on the sustainability of aquatic ecosystems. This is incompatible with treating water as a speculative asset.   The commodification of water and speculation in futures markets contributes to the vulnerability of the poorest and most marginalized, and to increasing environmental degradation. When we talk about water, we are talking about human rights and vital values for our societies, which the logic of the market - and even less the logic of speculation - neither recognize, nor can adequately manage.   The lessons learned from the 2008 housing and food crises should be seen as a warning: if the entry of water into futures markets is not stopped, progress on the realisation of the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation will be much more difficult.   Treating housing, food, the environment and water as assets to be traded upon by hedge funds and other financial actors in financial derivatives markets represents a direct attack on people's exercise and enjoyment of human rights such as the right to housing, to food, to a healthy environment, or to drinking water and sanitation.   The UN human rights experts recalled that in 2015 states adopted the Sustainable Development Goals with the aspiration to leave no one behind. To achieve that, States should, among others, implement effective economic and social reforms to ensure that the benefits of growth are equitably distributed to all segments of the population in order to reduce inequalities and achieve the fulfilment of human rights. The financialisation of water, the environment, housing or food contradicts these goals.   Concerned about this growing threat that financialisation poses on the exercise of human rights, the human rights experts joining this statement call on States:   - To ensure an adequate regulation of the financial services industry to prevent the negative impacts resulting from the growth of markets for derivatives based on goods, services and resources essential to the enjoyment of human rights.   - With a view to guaranteeing the right to adequate housing, to take urgent legal measures to control the entry for the purpose of speculation of large financial corporations into housing, real estate and associated sectors, and to impose anti-speculative measures such as rent control, price capture, tax measures, price stabilization, usurious profit margin or anti-flipping taxes.   - With a view to guaranteeing the right to food, to ensure that only qualified investors who deal with such instruments on the basis of expectations regarding market fundamentals, rather than by speculative motives, can deal with food commodity derivatives.   - With a view to guaranteeing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, to prevent the degradation, pollution (especially toxic) and ensure the health and sustainability of aquatic ecosystems by speculative operations and promote national and international legal measures that guarantee the ecological health of rivers, lakes, wetlands, and all other water bodies.   - With a view to guaranteeing the human rights to safe drinking water and sanitation, to adopt urgent legal measures to prevent water, as a public good, from being managed as a financial asset in futures markets under the speculative logic that presides over these markets, promoting democratic governance of water and sanitation services under a human rights approach.   - To prevent environmental injustices, and prevent actions that jeopardize rights of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and peasant communities to the lands, waters, ecosystems and biodiversity that are the foundation of their cultures and livelihoods.   - To recognize, in law, the land and water titles, tenures, rights and responsibilities of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and peasant communities, enabling them to apply customary laws, traditional ecological knowledge and their own governance systems to the sustainable stewardship of water, land, ecosystems and biodiversity in their territories of life over and above commercial and speculative interests and strategies.   http://www.ohchr.org/en/statements/2021/10/joint-statement-independent-united-nations-human-rights-experts-warning-threat   * Reclaiming Public Services for a Just Recovery. (GI-ESCR)   Nine global and regional human rights representatives reflect on the crucial role of public services in building a more sustainable, inclusive, socially-just and resilient economy and society, in this 2 hour webinar.   http://www.gi-escr.org/latest-news/enough-is-enough-the-future-is-public-a-unique-and-well-attended-conversation-with-nine-human-rights-officials http://futureispublic.org/global-manifesto/ Visit the related web page
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