Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

On a number of occasions in recent weeks and again with the Taoiseach today I have raised the issue of access to the vaccine on a global basis being critical to the effectiveness of the vaccine anywhere. If access is not provided to the vaccine for poorer countries, this potentially will create a massive hole in vaccine cover which will allow for mutations and potentially undermine the efficacy of the vaccine. We are literally all in this together. The report from Johns Hopkins University public health school today that up to a quarter of the world's population in the poorest countries may not have access to the vaccine until 2022 is a major cause of alarm. The report goes on to say that pricing issues are a problem. There are also different attitudes. While some are co-operating with poorer countries and with generic producers of vaccines in poorer countries, others are not. What will we do about it?

People Before Profit has tabled a motion in this regard but, unfortunately, we do not have Private Members' time, so it cannot be taken until the new year. However, we appeal to the Government to look at the motion on the Order Paper today. It calls on the Government to raise in Europe the need to support the proposals from India and South Africa that aspects of the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights, TRIPS, relating to intellectual property regarding the vaccines and vaccine technology would be waived so there is no profit inhibitor on the distribution of the technologies that are necessary to produce the vaccine quickly and so generic producers around the world would be able to produce it.

Indeed, we hears the Minister, Deputy Stephen Donnelly, saying there will be very low numbers of the vaccine here, that it will be perhaps by the end of the year and that the Government is not quite sure when it will have the rest of the population vaccinated, we start to worry even about this country. When will we get all these vaccines? There is massive pharmaceutical capacity in this country. Is there an issue with us having access to the technology, once it is available, and all the data? I ask the Government to support the proposals that have been brought forward, to vote accordingly at the WTO and to raise it in the European Union. All the normal mechanisms through which multinationals protect their profits, and are allowed to do so with laws on intellectual property, patents and so forth, should be waived. If we are serious about us all being in it together and trying to eliminate Covid-19, this is an absolute necessity. The Government must be very vocal and proactive in pursuing it.

I also wish to raise the issue of content moderators. It is somewhat Covid-related but has another dimension. I do not know if the Minister of State has read some of the articles in the Business Post, but I have been in contact with some of the people who work in this area, although not directly in the well-paid jobs in Instagram and Facebook. They work for CPL/Covalent and Accenture in badly paid jobs but do incredibly traumatic work. They have to moderate vile content such as suicide and self-harm promotion, terrorist activities, abusive posts, videos and so forth. In one report by Facebook, over a three-month period there were 1.3 million posts relating to the promotion of self-harm and suicide. Human beings have the job of trying to weed these things out, and many of them are suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. They had to sue Facebook and so forth about it, and they did that successfully. Something must be done about this at European level to protect those workers and ensure they have proper counselling support.

I also discovered when I talked to these people that, during the level 5 restrictions, more than 1,000 of them were working in the office when they should have been working at home. I believe there were similar situations in East Wall. It must be asked why the infection rates did not go down low. It was because the level 5 injunction that if people could work from home, they should do so was not being enforced and respected in some of these big workplaces that have more than 1,000 people going into them. That must be investigated.

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