The Diplomat
More than 170 former heads of state and government and Nobel laureates have signed an open letter to U.S. President Joe Biden urging him to support a waiver of intellectual property rules for COVID-19 vaccines.
The joint letter, signed last Wednesday by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Mikhail Gorbachev, Gordon Brown, Helen Clark, François Hollande, Mauricio Macri, Romano Prodi, Mary Robinson, Lech Walesa, Juan Manuel Santos, Joseph Stiglitz, Desmond Tutu or Rigoberta Menchú, among many other former leaders and Nobel laureates, was sent to the White House as U.S. health authorities advised a pause in the use of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.
The signatories – which include some 75 former leaders from all continents, many of them members of the Club de Madrid – also ask the U.S. president to pursue a people’s vaccine to end the pandemic and to take the urgent steps “that only he can” for this moment to “be remembered in history as the time we chose to put the collective right to safety for all ahead of the commercial monopolies of the few”.
Specifically, the letter asks President Biden to support a proposal from the governments of South Africa and India at the World Trade Organization (WTO) to temporarily waive intellectual property rules related to COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, which would allow for generic manufacturing in the U.S. around the world, “overcoming artificial supply constraints.” “At the current pace of vaccinations, most poor nations will be left waiting until at least 2024 to achieve mass COVID-19 immunization”, and it is likely that “only 10 percent of people in the majority of poor countries will be vaccinated in the next year”, it adds.
The signatories also called for the intellectual property waiver to be accompanied by the open sharing of vaccine know-how and technology, and by coordinated global investment in research, development, and manufacturing capacity, underscoring that “threats to public health are global”. “These actions would expand global manufacturing capacity, unhindered by industry monopolies that are driving the dire supply shortages blocking vaccine access”, they add.
The international action, which also includes Danilo Türk, former president of Slovenia and current president of the Club de Madrid, is coordinated by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition of more than 50 organizations including the Club de Madrid, the Yunus Center, Oxfam, UNAIDS, Physicians for Human Rights, Nizami Ganjavi International Center, Global Justice Now and Avaaz. Zapatero is the only one of the four Spanish members of the Club de Madrid to have signed the letter (the other three are former Prime Ministers Felipe González, José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy).
