Amnesty: pharmaceutical companies have failed over corona

According to Amnesty International, pharmaceutical companies have “failed tragically” in their contribution to combating the corona-induced global health crisis. In a statement published Monday, the human rights organization said the failure came despite repeated and urgent calls for a fair distribution of corona vaccines in The pharmaceutical companies’ policies have contributed to “a human rights catastrophe” in 2021, according to the organization.

According to Amnesty, the companies that produce the corona vaccines have monopolized sales in 2021, lobbied against intellectual property sharing, overpriced their vaccines and prioritized deliveries to rich countries.

The ten billion doses of vaccine they produced in 2021 could have been more than enough to achieve a global vaccination coverage of 40 percent. That was the goal of the World Health Organization WHO. Instead, by the end of that year, only 4 percent of people in poor countries had been fully vaccinated.

Rich countries hoarded vaccines, hampering delivery to poorer parts of the world. Rajat Khosla, Amnesty International’s Research, Advocacy and Policy Director, emphasizes that “pharmaceutical companies played a central role in that human rights catastrophe”. According to him, the companies could have been the heroes of 2021. “Instead, they turned their backs on those who needed the vaccines most. They chose profit over human lives.”

Amnesty International calls for a change of course in 2022, in order to be able to achieve the new WHO target by July this year: a worldwide vaccination rate of 70 percent. Earlier this month, the WHO announced that an additional €14 billion will be needed to help poorer countries also get the pandemic under control.