Vaccine Production

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.

❤