Vaccine, Sirleaf (Oms): "Licensing of Covid vaccines in three months or patent moratorium"
Covid vaccine licences or patent moratorium, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (WHO): “Some of you are already close to finishing your immunisation campaign and have excess doses. You are in a position to donate”
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on patent moratorium
“The local production capacity for Covid-19 vaccines needs to be strengthened through voluntary licensing agreements and transfer of know-how.
If this does not happen within three months, a moratorium on serum patents will be necessary”.
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This is how Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, co-chair of the Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response set up by the World Health Organisation (WHO), launched the appeal to the G20 member countries.
Sirleaf, who is the first female president of Liberia and all of Africa, was speaking at the opening press conference of the Global Health Summit in Rome, at the initiative of the Italian presidency of the forum of major economies.
Sirleaf said that “full funding of the G20’s Access to Covid-19 Tools Acceleratord initiative” for the worldwide distribution of vaccines “must be achieved” as an “essential contribution to ending the pandemic”.
The former president of Liberia urged the world’s richest countries to “support through the Gavi alliance and the Covax initiative the distribution of at least one billion doses of vaccine by September to the world’s 92 lowest-income countries”.
Sirleaf continued: ‘Some of you are already close to finishing your immunisation campaign and have surplus doses. You are in a position to donate.
The Panel co-chair also said that “the crisis we are in is the result of geopolitical tensions and nationalism, which have weakened the multilateral system that was designed to keep the world safe”.
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