Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I would like to speak to an item on the European Council agenda dealing with Covid-19 vaccination. I want to pivot away from speaking about this in just the European context and to talk about the moral imperative that rests on us to show solidarity with low and middle-income countries. In the words of Dr. Tedros, the head of the WHO:

I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure - and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world's poorest countries.

Measures of progress on the sustainable development goals estimate that we have seen about a decade of progress on eradicating poverty wiped out by this pandemic. Dr. Mike Ryan said that Covid-19 has served as an amplifier of global inequities and global injustice and has further highlighted how intrinsically linked health and human rights are. Many of the countries I am speaking about have little or no ICU or even bed capacity, leaving their hospital staff with no choice but to turn away people in desperate need of help. The well used phrase, “Nobody is safe until we are all safe”, has never been as true as when we talk about developing and distributing vaccines around the world. This should be a key pillar of any discussion among our leaders about the Covid vaccine at the European Council meeting this weekend.

Ireland is well placed to champion any and all options that maximise the development and distribution of vaccines for those very countries. This is not just about a moral imperative. It is also in our interest to ensure that as many people as possible are safe. We are already seeing the disruptions caused by coronavirus variants. This will only worsen if we enter into vaccine escape. We need to take full advantage of the facilities across the world to develop and deliver vaccines.

A number of international initiatives aim to enact global solidarity against Covid-19. Today marks one year since the WHO launched its ACT-Accelerator, the leading programme to tackle Covid-19 and speed up the global distribution of vaccines.

I am proud that our Government has supported and contributed to such initiatives, including Irish Aid’s €4 million funding for the COVAX facility and through our work in the UN Security Council, which unanimously agreed a resolution to strengthen international co-operation such as the ACT-Accelerator and within that, the COVAX facility. Even these efforts will fall far short of what is needed, and the virus will remain rampant in many parts of the world with a risk of vaccine escape. We are seeing campaigns spring up in reaction to the very practical barriers that are preventing low- and middle-income countries from using their own facilities to develop the vaccine. These barriers mainly relate to knowledge and data, intellectual property and appropriate technology.

One initiative seeking to address these barriers is the Covid technology access pool, C-TAP, launched by the Government of Costa Rica and the WHO, a voluntary programme for sharing knowledge, data and intellectual property. Another initiative from the governments of India and South Africa calls for a temporary waiver through the WTO of the intellectual property protections of the vaccine, an initiative commonly referred to as the trade-related aspects of intellectual property, TRIPS, waiver. This idea is gaining support, with more than 57 countries in the WTO co-sponsoring it. While solutions are rarely as straightforward as they seem, I believe it is fundamental that we continue to look at these options and find ways to empower vulnerable countries to do more for their people.

Internationally this country is good at partnerships. The very essence of partnership is working together, not just making donations and handing out spare vaccines, crumbs from the table. Ireland is well-placed, and the EU can do much more to demonstrate this international solidarity.

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