Free the Vaccine for COVID-19

This week, our participants thought about the spheres of influence for our campaign and how they might give people in each sphere the opportunity to get involved with their actions. As part of this mission, they also refined the posters they’ve been working on for the past couple weeks! Here’s a graphic that illustrates what we mean by spheres of influence:

Let’s take a look at how some of our squads interpreted this week’s mission!

The Narlugas Are Born

First off, we have a brand new lab: the Narlugas, who are working to create a physical and virtual exhibition of the posters our participants are making, which will help to increase our engagement with the public! In lab founder Laura Holzman’s words:

We’re creating a Free the Vaccine exhibition to tell a story about artistic activism and access to medicines in a way that invites new audiences to harness their own power to promote equity.

We’re envisioning a virtual traveling exhibition with optional physical components that many venues can host at once. Our primary audience is university communities. We want to create space for serious, difficult conversations about how universities can make a big difference in making medicine more affordable and accessible. We’re also providing a more immediate resource: reliable, substantive content that campus galleries can host for free as they navigate new policies related to in-person and virtual programming.

As we try to increase public support for our campaign, the virtual exhibition will help us reach a wider audience and tap into university students and faculty, who have a stake in and leverage over institutional licensing policies.

The Boars Get Animated

The Boars are almost finished with this great video targeting CureVac, which they hope to edit and use for other targets as well! While you won’t understand the video unless you know German, I think you’ll agree that the animation is super adorable and high quality:

https://vimeo.com/423138078

I love this action because not only does it have the potential to capture the attention of targets, but it’s a great video to disseminate to the public as well. The team is currently thinking of the best way to share the video with employees at CureVac and other research institutes!

The Bisons Make Connections

We’d like to share the really interesting approach that the Bisons have taken at Indiana University. While many of our squads have made researchers their primary targets, the Bisons have focused on building relationships with the Indiana University library, because they’re already involved with open access efforts, and with the university’s Public Relations department, which is working to promote its COVID-19 research. By building a coalition of support within various branches of the university, they’re thinking more broadly about their circles of influence and the types of groups that can give them leverage in the campaign.

And Now, Posters…

We shared some last week, but we’re excited to share these new visuals coming out of our Labs! We look forward to showing these posters and more to a broad audience once our traveling gallery is established.

This week, our participants continued to work on poster designs and powerful visuals to use in their actions! At the same time, they helped each other turn up the pressure on their targets, brainstorming responses to reluctant targets and sharing approaches that work. We have exciting updates coming for you soon on that front, but for now, here’s what some of our teams have been up to this week:

The Dolphins Light A Fire

While the Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne declined to sign the Open COVID Pledge, that’s not the end of this story for the Dolphins. The team wrote an excellent response a) highlighting the $17 million in public funding the university has received, according to UAEM’s mapping project, b) asking the university to explain what it has done (if anything) to ensure access, so that we can report this to our global network, and c) reminding the university of our high-profile allies, like Doctors Without Borders, and other universities which have adopted our recommendations, like McGill. Their response will serve as a great model for our other squads to use if conversations with university leadership stall.

The Seals Weave A Story

Meanwhile, our Seal team has seen major progress on their “Goodnight Stories for Rebel Scientists” project, drafting a letter to the researcher Hanneke Schuitemaker and commissioning the artist Onke Truijen to paint her portrait. Their letter to Hanneke includes the beginning of her tale, asking her to complete the story by supporting Free The Vaccine and the Open COVID Pledge! It’s a beautiful way to combine their creative tactic with their strategy for convincing their target. And speaking of beautiful, check out the portrait and book cover in progress.

The Labs Play With Images

Our activists are constantly looking for creative ways to communicate a rather technical issue and connect with people. This project from the Seals makes our argument extremely clear: in the fight against the pandemic, IP and patents “protect” the virus from our prevention and treatment efforts, allowing the pandemic to continue.

Here are some more poster ideas, from across the Salk Labs: