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

There are many uncertainties with the Covid pandemic, particularly now with the emergence of the Delta variant. There is uncertainty about whether we can win the race in terms of vaccination to get ahead of this variant and ensure that things do not go into reverse, plunging us into lockdowns and more people getting sick and going to hospital. It is still unclear, given where we are at in the vaccination programme, whether the rise in the Delta variant will lead to higher levels of hospitalisation, sickness, admission to ICU, or, indeed, fatality.

However, there is one thing that we pretty much do know now, which is the more people who are vaccinated, the better protected we are and the less likely it will be that variants will undermine all the progress that has been made. We know that is not just true here. Critically, on a global level, it is true that even if we get to the point we need to - and we are not there yet - in terms of having sufficient numbers of people vaccinated, if huge swathes of the world do not have access to vaccines, more variants will develop and those variants will reach Ireland, Europe and other places, even though people may be vaccinated.

The question of vaccine supplies, both for here and globally, is critical if we are going to get beyond this grim, depressing pandemic. There is a very significant movement that has been calling, particularly on the EU, to waive the intellectual property rights and patents that the big pharmaceutical vaccine-producing companies are using to protect their profits. It is a serious problem. The European Parliament has voted by a majority to say that those intellectual property restrictions and patents should be removed and that the vaccine-producing companies should be forced to share the technology to produce the vaccines with anybody who can produce them across the world. Let us be clear, it is profit that is stopping them from doing that. Pfizer is making an 80% mark-up on the doses of its vaccine because it wants to protect the money it is making. That is not acceptable. In fact, it is immoral, when some of the poorest countries in the world have less than 1% of their populations vaccinated.

We need to use every single bit of capacity, globally, to produce vaccines if we are going to defeat this pandemic and come out of this miserable situation that we have been in for the last year and half. Yet, the European Commission - it is not clear what the Government's position is on the issue - is not committing to that position and supporting the people's vaccine. There is a meeting of the WTO on 14 July. What is the Government's position? Will it call for the people's vaccine, which is being supported by Dr. Mike Ryan and the WHO, to allow the sharing of vaccine technology to increase the supply of vaccines globally to all those who need them?

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