Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I again emphasise the amount of public money that has been invested by governments in private companies to research this vaccine. It runs into tens of billions at this stage. At the crux of this argument, because we can talk about and almost intellectualise why companies have to have property rights to what they create, we are talking about an emergency that the world has not seen for the past 75 years. We are talking about people dying unnecessarily while big pharma creates huge amounts of money and profits for its shareholders.

It is a binary choice. On the one hand, do we protect big pharma and its intellectual product?

Is it, on the other hand, to protect the vulnerable, the poor and people who cannot access vaccines? That is the binary choice. When it comes down to it, there are governments in rich countries that do not care about poor people and never have. That is the nature of capitalism, which at its heart has to cannibalise, consume and profit from a product. That is what it is doing with vaccines. Rationally, one would think this vaccine would be available to everybody and that everybody in this world would have got at least one. However, 40% of the world has not got any. How anybody logically can stand and defend that, I find very hard to take.

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