Month: March 2021

I am calling on the world’s government’s to agree to suspend intellectual property rights regarding vaccine technology, and allow the full manufacturing capacity of the world to be used to combat covid-19, globally.

There is so much at stake, this one-time abrogation of IP rights is the right thing to do. MANY OTHER FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS HAVE BEEN SUSPENDED.

People of the world have had so many basic rights suspended. The right to work, the right to leave your own house. The right to run a business. All abrogated by govts for the greater good. What’s so special about intellectual property rights?

Needs must. Bigger picture.

Covid-19 is having a devastating effect around the world. People continue to die, to suffer, to get long covid which will change their lives forever. The effects on economies around the world are devastating. Hundreds of millions of additional people face going into severe poverty.

Vaccines are a way out of this mess. For the sake of billions of people worldwide, governments of the world should agree to suspend intellectual property rights regarding vaccines, as a one-off measure for uniquely important reasons, to allow all available vaccine manufacturing capacity to be used to combat this crisis. The world is far from out of trouble.

Even if you only care about the situation here in the UK, and nothing else, this would still be the right move, because combating covid worldwide is immensely important to the UK, for 3 reasons. Firstly, viruses do not respect international borders. Secondly, the number of new variants, and hence the number of more deadly or more transmissible variants, is roughly proportional to how many people get infected with covid, and any new variants will eventually reach us. And thirdly, the economic effects resulting in other countries will obviously have a knock-on effect in the UK. We live in a global economy and an interconnected world.

We really should do this.

❤