[powerpress]
with your host, Tessa Marshall.
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Free the Vaccine News Episode 9
Category: News
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Merith at the Count the Votes Rally in D.C.
The day before the election results were declared in the US, Merith Basey on behalf of UAEM and Free the Vaccine, was invited to join allied groups Spaces in Action, Casa in action and others in DC to support the call to “Count the Votes”. The speakers were almost all recent immigrants asked to share why voting matters and the impact it would have on their lives and their communities. Merith of course linked the election to the COVID-19 response, access to the vaccine and the lives that depend on it around the world.
Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 participant, Caitlin Berrigan, has an essay published in the journal March titled “Atmospheres of the Undead: living with viruses, loneliness, and neoliberalism.” In it she talks about how living with Hepatitis C “reveals the structural inequalities of profit-oriented biomedicine.”
You can read it, or download an audio version.
Image Credit: Dado Ruvic/Reuters/Washington Post
“Megan McArdle was correct that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed the drug development system is working. What she didn’t mention is that the system is working as it was designed: to maximize monopoly profits for the pharmaceutical industry.”
Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) board member and Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 participant Aly Bancroft submitted a Letter to the Editor that was featured in the Washington Post! Aly is also the campaign coordinator at Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines program. Read the full letter here.
Recently, I was given the opportunity to be able to learn more about one of our participants: Dannie Synder. Dannie has been living all over the place since the start of the pandemic, from Austin to Washington D.C. to Mexico City, but has been a dedicated participant of the Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 campaign since Season 1. Read more about her work throughout and beyond the campaign below!
What does the Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 movement mean to you?
I am an artivist: an artistic activist. I consider myself an activist, and I started out in mostly prison abolition. I began as a teacher in juvenile detention centers and through that became interested in the prison abolition movement, particularly because it touches so many different elements from homelessness to mental health to the Black Lives Matter movement — and I’m learning more how it touches access to medicine. This is an area that I have never had much experience and I’m still learning a lot. I’m still gaining confidence in speaking about this movement, and everyday it is shocking to me that access to medicines is an issue. That was one of the reasons I wanted to join this campaign — this is an area that I have been really hesitant to get into as it seems very technical and embedded in the legal system. This campaign is allowing me the opportunity to continue developing my abilities as an artistic activist.
Given that you mentioned your experience working in prison abolition, have you made any connections with the access to medicines movement?
Well, I’m learning more about mental health issues and with the BLM movement and with everything else that is going on right now, we have to ask these questions like “who do we call when there’s an emergency?” We cannot call the police because it leads to violence, so who can we call and what kind of organizations are available in different cities?
This is really addressing the issues of communities with lack of access to not just physical medicine, but also mental health resources. I’m someone who doesn’t have health insurance, and I’m learning how difficult it is to get health insurance in America. I did not realize until during this campaign that one in five people can’t afford their medicine and can’t get access to medicine — I am curious to learn more about prisoners in particular those with mental health issues how many of them actually had access to the essential services that they need.
What are you most looking forward to for this season?
Right now in Season 2, one one of the leaders of our team of our lab is helping come up with really great tactics. One of the things I continue to learn about everyday is we can come up with all these really creative tactics, but what’s actually going to be effective? I really like working with the artistic activism side of this campaign, because we are really good at pushing each other and pushing everyone. I think working also with people from an access to medicines background helps us decide how we are going to get results, since they have experience dealing with the more legal aspects of medicine.
One thing in particular: I have been super excited about the Jolene vaccine challenge. We made the video the trailer to our music video trailer season 1 and probably by the end of November early December we’re going to make the full-length music video. This is all super exciting for me; I felt very important and I felt very happy that we made something which got so much traction on social media. It was a really nice moment we felt like even though we didn’t get Vanderbilt University on the phone yet (who is our target) you know we still can get a response from them from the video. We felt like we did accomplish something by all the people who were exposed to our video, and learned something important and new about the access to medicines movement.
What do you think would be a good outcome for this campaign?
It would be great if we could garner an impressive number of universities to sign onto the Open COVID Pledge. If we could get an institution like [Major State University] to sign the Open COVID Pledge, we know that people like politicians for example are going to pay attention to that. We need to always push universities to do better, and if we can do that, then we have done our part as a campaign!
On November 12th, 18 producers of generic medicines joined an effort by the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) in order to expedite access to COVID-19 intellectual property. The MPP is a UN-backed public health organization that accelerates access to essential medicines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In addition, a generic drug is a drug that works the same way and provides the same clinical benefits as a brand-name drug, but for a lower cost.
In this rare move, a group of pharmaceutical manufacturing companies recently signed onto the MPP’s COVID-19 Open Pledge, promising to “work together via the Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) to accelerate access to hundreds of millions of doses of new interventions for low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).” Under this pledge, the manufacturing companies are offering their production capacities to helping create billions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines or therapies for LMICs, given that the producers of the therapies allow them to be licensed to these generic manufacturers.
Read more on STAT News here.
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Today in the News: The Pfizer Vaccine
Today, global media outlets have been sharing news from the developers of one vaccine candidate, Pfizer and BioNTech. The world has had its eyes on the vaccine, which has already been tested on 43,500 people in six countries with no reported safety concerns, for a few months now.
This week, it was reported that the vaccine offers 90% protection. While this is sufficient to be optimistic, the data reported is not the final analysis. According to BBC, the precise effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine can change as more results are analyzed. The vaccine has yet to be approved by the FDA and other agencies, and the information on its safety and efficacy is not final.
With talk about the vaccine spreading through the media today, one may ask themselves: when will I get the vaccine? Pfizer and BioNTech report that they can supply 50 million doses by the end of this year, and 1.3 billion by the end of 2021. Given the fact that each person needs 2 doses for the vaccine to be effective, these numbers could potentially mean 25 million doses in 2020 and 650 million doses by the end of 2021. The vaccine also possesses logistical challenges, such as the need to store it at cold temperatures that require special refrigeration and transport. No plans for vaccine allocation have been finalized on the national level, although it is speculated that healthcare workers and first responders will be the first to receive a vaccine, once approved. Read more from ABC News here.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), noted that there is cause to be optimistic. In an interview with STAT News, Dr. Fauci remarked that all the vaccines developed by major manufactures working with Operation Warp Speed, the U.S. government’s effort to quickly bring a vaccine to market, target the same protein that the Pfizer vaccine does. Thus, other vaccines may roll out positive news in the upcoming months as well! Read the full article on STATS News here.
A recent report published by Health Policy Watch explored the role of the Gates Foundation, a huge superpower and decision-maker when it comes to the research and development (R&D) of several health technologies, in the COVID-19 pandemic.
While their actions may appear commendable on the surface level, Health Policy Watch explored the ways that the Gates foundation is contributing to trends and actions that have reinforced systemic problems, several of which have been exacerbated by COVID-19.
From a general lack of transparency, to the defense of intellectual property rights, to their relationship(s) with large pharmaceutical companies, the Gates Foundation has been complicit in several problems that have plagued the industry for decades. Read more from Health Policy Watch here.
This week, our participants at Free the Vaccine for COVID-19 have continued to share their creativity with the world. Keep reading for some highlights from different groups who are working to convince universities around the world to support access to the COVID-19 vaccine!
1. Brittany Herrick took a photo of herself at Dr. Jonas Salk’s grave. Dr. Salk is known for creating the Polio vaccine, which he refused to patent on the grounds that the patent belongs to the people. His refusal to profit from the vaccine saved thousands and thousands of lives. Brittany and her team used Photoshop to send the message that Dr. Salk’s philosophy must be applied to the COVID-19 vaccine as well:
2. Our participants in London have been working hard to contact researchers at Imperial University working on COVID-19 research. To add a personal touch, they made a mask for their mascot which had more information on C-TAP, the COVID-19 technology access pool:
3. One group of participants re-enacted a fictional conversation between COVID-19, a concerned person, a university, Big Pharma, and the Plague Doctor:
And many more! With the 2020 U.S. general election capturing the attention of hundreds of millions of individuals around the world, we must not forget that our organizing work must continue throughout and beyond this election, regardless of the outcome. We must continue to fight for access to a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine – as our participants have continued to do.