Virologist Marc Van Ranst symbolically extinguished a few fires on the training grounds of the fire brigade school in Ghent harbor on Monday. The action was part of the call of the European citizens’ initiative “No profit on pandemic” to make vaccines against COVID-19 more accessible worldwide.
–
“The message from my presence here is that it is difficult to extinguish a pandemic if there is still a reservoir left,” said the virologist. In developing countries, for example, only 10 percent of the population is vaccinated. In this way, the coronavirus continues to circulate and new variants can arise, Van Ranst warns.
According to the NGO ‘We Social Movements’, one of the most important steps to be taken to make vaccines more accessible is to lift the patents. “This is a temporary suspension, limited to the vaccines against COVID-19,” said Mia Vandenberghe of the NGO. She points out that the big pharmaceutical companies cannot now produce enough to give everyone in the world a vaccine quickly. “And so one has to cancel the patents. Afterwards, knowledge about production should be shared, so that more producers worldwide can get started.”
According to her, local production in a number of third world countries can also improve confidence in the vaccine against COVID-19. The NGO, together with several dozen other organizations in Europe, is trying to collect one million signatures, so that the European Commission must put this issue back on the agenda. “It is the Commission, which has a seat in the World Trade Organization, which then decides whether to cancel the patents,” it sounds. Van Ranst acknowledges that it is not easy to convince policymakers, “because politicians are judged on how they tackle the pandemic in their own country (..) But Europe, the US and Australia must coordinate this”.
—
