City Council Backs Global Vaccination Effort

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 694,725,135 doses of the vaccine against COVID-19 have been delivered across the country as of March 11, 2022, and 216,449,810 people (over 65% of the U.S. population) are considered fully vaccinated.



More than 10.9 billion vaccine doses have been administered globally, and about 50 percent of the global population is now fully vaccinated, mostly in wealthier countries, however more than 3 billion people around the world have yet to receive a single dose.



A resolution offered by Councilor Breadon states that, “A failure to vaccinate the global population as quickly as possible will allow the virus to continue mutating and developing resistance to existing vaccines, as has been confirmed by the emergence of the Omnicron variant.”



Moderna and Pfizer currently have patent protections over the COVID-19 vaccine. On October 2, 2020, India and South Africa requested a temporary waiver of patents, trade secrets, and other intellectual property protections required by the World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) on COVID-19 related health technologies. Such protections give pharmaceutical companies monopoly control over the production, price, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. This waiver would end vaccine originators’ ability to block production and provide the legal certainty needed for governments and investors to start constructing pharmaceutical manufacturing facilities and repurposing existing ones, accelerating the global vaccination effort.



Moderna has refused to support the TRIPS waiver.



This week, the Council went on record urging the Biden Administration to intensify their efforts to deliver on the WTO TRIPS waiver, and urged Moderna and Pfizer to engage in immediate and full vaccine technology transfer.