Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Deputy Paul Murphy. It is quite tragic listening to all the cases for urgent vaccinations, whether for midwives, carers, ambulance drivers or people involved in funerals and so on. The reason for that tragedy is that our vaccination programme is a shambles and there are reasons for that other than the lack of vaccines. They include the underlying weakness in our public health system, the lack of a national immunisation database, and the fact that we do not have the numbers of public health doctors we require. The row over vaccination production is being cast in terms of the UK versus the EU and we should be very careful about seeing it in that way. Like many companies, AstraZeneca has form in this. It was before the European Court of Justice in 2012 in another case of abuse of intellectual property rights. I am making a very clear call today for us to move away from the idea that we have to compete with other countries and other areas of interest. Rather, we should move towards something that has been called for on a global scale by Oxfam and international human rights groups, led by India and South Africa. They are calling for a "people's vaccine", as it has become known, which would mean freeing up the intellectual property rights and agreeing that on a global scale in order that every country that has the ability to engage in the pharmaceutical industry can do so. We certainly have that ability here. Just before Christmas, People Before Profit put a motion on the Order Paper. It read:

That Dáil Éireann, in view of the serious threat that Covid-19 poses to people all over the world: — calls on the World Trade Organization (WTO) to allow all countries to choose to neither grant nor enforce patents and other intellectual property [rights] related to Covid-19 drugs, vaccines, diagnostics and other technologies for the duration of the pandemic;

— mandates the Government to demand that European Union policy is changed so as it votes at the WTO to allow this to occur

[...]

— calls for full open disclosure of all scientific and clinical trial data related to the development and production of such vaccines, and should this occur, further calls for the convocation of an expert panel to independently analyse the data and develop public health communication strategies based on their findings ...

I ask the Minister to support that motion. Will he please respond to it?

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