A year of coronavirus. It flew by in a flash and at the same time lasted a century. We were told that everything would soon pass, that all we had to do was wait, suspend our lives. We were asked to sacrifice ourselves in the face of isolation and loneliness, of anguish about the future, of the many material difficulties with which we had to deal on our own.
And yet, despite our best efforts, Covid-19 continues to spread like wildfire, and the latest news about new variants of the Coronavirus is forcing us to push back the date with the end of the pandemic even further.
The reason is simple: we are all so intimately connected that pulling ourselves out of this nightmare is not possible.
RIGHT TO HEALTH FOR ALL!
The right to health either exists for everyone or it does not exist for anyone. It is not only a sacrosanct principle of social justice: none of us will be able to feel safe as long as there is someone who remains cut off from the possibility of protecting himself from contagion, from the administration of safe and effective vaccines, in any corner of the world, because, until then, there will always be the possibility of restarting the chain of contagions and the tragedy in which we are immersed.
PUBLIC RESEARCH MUST MEAN PUBLIC CONTROL
We have seen the best of our public research lent to the interests of the big drug multinationals. Each company has speculated on the discoveries of basic research, intensifying its own on vaccine and drug development alone, in order to prevail over the others, to grab maximum profits on the huge market that opened up the pandemic.
We would have had a greater advantage if the forces had been common, if research and technologies had been put at the sole service of our lives and of the whole of humanity. But instead, in the name of the interests of a few, of the principle of nationalism between States, a few industrial giants continue to decide who should live and who should die, who should have access to vaccines, with what timescale and at what price, going so far as to be able to afford to break their commitments by unilaterally cancelling them.
IMMEDIATE SUSPENSION OF PATENTS AND TRANSPARENCY!
All this is made possible by patents, which allow exclusive rights to the development and marketing of vaccines, restrict their availability and increase their cost. Patents are the obstacle that is currently preventing the rapid development of vaccines for all the peoples of the world, as India and South Africa are clamouring for; they are the stopper to any form of transparency on the studies carried out to date and on the real effectiveness of the molecules currently available, on everything that concerns their marketing, the contracts signed, the production costs, and finally on how many of these costs have been passed on to the purchasing States and thus, indirectly, to the pockets of us citizens.
A VACCINE FOR THE COMMON GOOD IS POSSIBLE
But this is not the only possible fate. It is recent news that the production of the first 150,000 doses of Soberana vaccine has begun in Cuba, with a commitment to cover the needs of all countries excluded from Big Pharma’s market, the willingness to vaccinate tourists who will land on the island, and to lend a hand in the future to the countries of the rich West, as we have already done in recent months with the medical brigades that we have seen arrive in support of us in Lombardy and Piedmont.
NO PROFIT ON PANDEMIC – NO PROFIT ON PANDEMIC!
Fortunately, here in Europe too, there are those who are trying to take this path.
Tens of thousands of European citizens are promoting the No Profit On Pandemic campaign to demand:
Health for all.
Private companies cannot be allowed to decide who has access to treatment and vaccines and at what price.
Transparency, clarity, information: data on production costs, public funds invested, contracts between public authorities and Big Pharma multinationals must be made public.
Public control: given that vaccines were developed thanks to research funded by citizens’ taxes, control of these technologies must remain in the hands of the people.
No profit on the pandemic: the coronavirus is a collective threat that requires a response based on solidarity, not on the profit motive of a few private individuals.
On 11 March, it will be one year since the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a Covid-19 pandemic emergency. The No Profit On Pandemic campaign has identified this date as a day of international mobilisation to bring to public attention the reasons of our peoples against those of a few private individuals.
WE CALL FOR THE 11TH OF MARCH TO BE SUPPORTED IN OUR COUNTRY AS WELL, BY
by identifying every possible form of collective mobilisation because our health cannot be privatised, nor reduced to a mere question of quotations going up or down on the stock exchange.
Our lives are more important than Big Pharma’s balance sheets.
