On Friday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, alongside more than 130 former world leaders, Nobel laureates, scientists and celebrities, signed an open letter from The People’s Vaccine Alliance. The letter calls for “an end to vaccine monopolies” from Western countries and “urgent action to vaccinate low and middle-income countries and bring an end to the COVID-19 pandemic”.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance demands coronavirus vaccines, treatments and tests are “freely available to everyone, everywhere”.
The letter warns that leaving billions of people unvaccinated risks leading to dangerous new variants of COVID-19.
The letter criticises the EU, UK, Germany and Switzerland for continuing “to block the lifting of intellectual property rules which would enable the redistribution and scale-up of COVID-19 vaccine, test and treatment manufacturing in the global south”.
It also issued five demands to world leaders including to “urgently agree and implement a global roadmap to deliver the WHO goal of fully vaccinating 70 percent of people by mid-2022”.
Another calls for maximising “the production of safe and effective vaccines and other COVID-19 products by suspending relevant intellectual property rules”.
The open letter goes on to warn “the pandemic is not over”, and blamed “self-defeating nationalism, pharmaceutical monopolies and inequality” for not vaccinating the world against the virus.
It goes on to add: “The transfer of largely publicly funded…
