Friday october fourteenth the organization doctors without borders refused a massive donation of one million vaccines for pneumonia from the company Pfizer. Why? You may ask, the reason may just have you agreeing with them. Jason Cone executive director of doctors without borders said that a donation would not help solve this problem at all. Pfizer has a patent of the vaccine PCV13 but also on the process of making it. This puts millions of people in danger and medical companies out of luck. SK chemicals were sued when they came close to making something like PCV13. This is almost like when states had to implement government programs with little to no money. Pfizer being the government and these companies being the states. There is no way around this medical giant or it’s prices which none can pay for, they have cornered the market. When being asked about striking a deal to lower the price for NGO’s
Pfizer said this quote ’we are actively exploring a number of new options to enable greater access to our pneumococcal vaccine to aid NGOS facing humanitarian emergency settings.’
Due to Pfizer’s stuberness DWB have to search for cheaper and more easily accessible options.
These alternative options can sometimes be second rate or harmful to the people it’s administered to. Kate Elder Vaccines Policy Advisor wrote this ‘In medicine, sometimes do no harm is an imperfect principle. It’s only possible to do the least harm’. This is truly sad millions of people might die just for the profit of billionaires. What’s worst is that Pfizer isn't the only one company doing this. ‘The rotavirus vaccine against diarrhea, HPV they are produced by GSK and Merck,The new malaria vaccine is only made by GSK’ as stated by in the article. These companies are killing people over a price tag and nothing is being done about, makes me wondering what other international injustices are going on.
How does this effect U.S. government and what can the government say or do help alleviate the problem of pneumonia?
ReplyDeleteHow can companies acess these vacsines and not have to pay these millions of dollars to help people ?
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