As the WTO meet's in Geneva for its 12th Ministerial Conference, we call on governments to support the proposal of India and South Africa, backed by close to 100 countries for a “Waiver From Certain Provisions Of The TRIPS Agreement For The Prevention, Containment And Treatment Of Covid-19”

Without the TRIPS waiver, pharmaceutical companies are able to prevent other manufacturers from producing COVID19 vaccines and medicines, impeding scaling up of production and contributing to addressing the vaccine apartheid.

The monopoly privileges given to pharmaceutical companies by the World Trade Organisation's Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement are allowing companies to make extravagant profits whilst workers and the public have worked tirelessly to ensure we overcome the crisis.

Vaccine apartheid is not only costing lives, it is extending the pandemic and putting us at risk of new variants of the virus as we have already seen. The much required covid recovery is only getting delayed as economies are crippled by uneven access to vaccines. The artificial scarcity of vaccines is allowing big pharma to dictate prices even to governments, which consumes public finances required for a healthy recovery.

• · For comrades in Geneva: join the protest at 5.30 pm at Place Lise-Girardin for a candlelight demonstration.

• · For those elsewhere: we encourage you and your members to take pictures of themselves at their workplace, individually or in groups, and join the twitter storm on the same day. You can submit your own event here.