FORMER prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad has joined a band of world leaders to appeal to governments to make Covid-19 vaccines available for free for the global common good.

The signatories, which included Nobel laureates and Nobel Laureates Organisations, civil society leaders, and world moral leaders from all over the globe has called for vaccines for the coronavirus to be made free of cost and free of any patent rights. 

They called on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to design a World Action Plan on the vaccine and to set up an international committee responsible for monitoring the research, and to ensure equal access for all countries and all people within a publicly announced predetermined timeframe. 

They said governments, foundations, international financial organisations like the World Bank and regional development banks should work out details of how to make the vaccines available free of cost. 

“We appeal to all world leaders, the United Nations secretary-general, director-general of the WHO, religious leaders, social leaders, moral leaders, leaders of research laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, and media leaders to join hands to ensure we have a global consensus for a free virus vaccine,” they said. 

“Our right to health can be guaranteed only by our duty to health, both on an individual and collective level. As a priority, there is a need for our conceptual recognition, and actual translation into action, of our responsibilities,” they said. 

“As the Covid-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc across Mother Earth, there is an explosion of research activities and clinical trials to find cures and vaccines,” they added.

“Indeed, everyone converges on the idea that ultimately the only way to definitively eradicate the pandemic is to have a vaccine that can be administered to all the inhabitants of the planet, urban or rural, men or women, living in rich or poor countries.” 

They said the pandemic has exposed the strengths and weaknesses of healthcare systems in different countries, as well as the obstacles and inequities of access to healthcare. 

“We invite all social, political, and health entities to re-affirm our collective responsibility for the protection of all vulnerable persons related to poverty, discrimination, gender, illness, loss of autonomy or functionality, or age,” they said.

The research for a vaccine, they said, is a long process, estimated to take 18 months to develop.

“This research needs immense economic investments. Many private sector research laboratories engaged in the vaccine research will be expecting a return on their investments. 

“We must work out an unambiguous procedure to determine what would be a fair level of this return in exchange for putting the vaccine in the public domain,” they said.

“For this reason, information issued by the private sector, scientists, and authorities, needs to be timely, accurate, clear, complete, and transparent,” they added.

Research results, they said, should be made public, and should also be made available to any production facility that pledges to operate under strict international regulatory supervision. – June 28, 2020.