Time to act: our demands
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown with absolute clarity how pharmaceutical companies are gaming an outbalanced system, to devastating effect, and how high-income country governments are complicit through their protection of pharmaceutical companies. Health is a human right and medicines save lives. States have a duty to protect human rights, including the right to health. The situation is urgent because the pandemic and its effect on people’s health, livelihoods and social lives is far from over.
Public Eye calls on the swiss government to immediately…
- … support C-TAP as the global solution for equitable access to COVID-19 medical tools;
- … support the TRIPS waiver proposed by India and South Africa allowing countries to temporarily suspend IP rights during the COVID-19 pandemic;
- … refrain from further hoarding and unambiguously support the current multilateral mechanism COVAX to tackle equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines;
- … publish its contracts with pharmaceutical companies for COVID-19 vaccines;
As a principle…
- … promote open science initiatives for equitable access to disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment;
- … fully implement the World Health Assembly’s transparency resolution on drug pricing (WHA72.8, May 2019), in particular ensuring no secret deals over drug pricing in Switzerland and no exclusions from the Freedom of Information law regarding drug pricing;
- … include reasonable pricing and access conditionalities in return for public funding of research and development;
- … use the existing TRIPS flexibilities such as compulsory licensing to deal with abusive monopolies.
Public Eye calls on pharmaceutical companies to immediately…
- … stop taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic;
- … commit to not enforcing intellectual property (IP) rights during the COVID-19 pandemic, and share all IP and know-how with C-TAP for a rapid scale-up of global production;
- … ensure deep technology transfer to other qualified producers with potential manufacturing capacity, including through collaboration with C-TAP;
- … make all clinical trial information available, including all protocols, entire clinical study reports and all the raw data;
- … abide by the guidance and decision of official health authorities (WHO) regarding the declaration of the end of the pandemic and refrain from all commercially motivated actions to take advantage of the pandemic;
- … refrain from exerting pressure to include confidentiality clauses and agree to the publication of vaccine contracts with governments;
- … disclose publicly and separately the corporate investment and public funding for the development of COVID-19 technologies to enable a detailed calculation of fair end prices.