The People's Vaccine: Will a COVID-19 Vaccine be Available to People North and South?
LIVE Webcast
An African-European Parliamentarians Initiative (AEPI) Event.
Monday, 15th June 2020, 1 pm - 2.15 pm CET
12.00 - 13.15 pm Irish and UK Time
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87344756530
The People's Vaccine
Recent months have seen unprecedented initiatives to ensure that there is equitable access to treatments for COVID-19 across the world.
Above all, in the words of one of the initiatives, “The People’s Vaccine,” the aim is to make a future vaccine for COVID-19 “available for all people, in all countries, free of charge.”
But how realistic are these initiatives when faced with intransigent nation states, governments, international organisations and the pharmaceutical industry?
What empirical grounds do they stand on given the ‘scandal of access’ that saw Africa blocked from HIV/AIDS treatments for almost a decade, while 800,000 unvaccinated children still die of pneumonia every year?
This LIVE web discussion will bring together leading policymakers and campaigners from Africa and Europe to realistically appraise these initiatives.
Speakers Include:
Ms. Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS and UN Under-Secretary General and signatory to “The People’s Vaccine” initiative
Dr. Ellen 't Hoen, Director Medicines Law and Policy, international lawyer and medical activist
Mr. Achal Prabhala, Leading Advocate for Access to Vaccines
Mr. Saul Walker, Deputy Director, DFID UK, COVID-19 Vaccines, Therapeutics and Diagnostics Strategy
About AEPI
The African–European Parliamentarians Initiative (AEPI) is a non-protit organisation which promotes good governance, human rights and democracy in Africa by offering technical support, capacity-building and training services to regional, national and sub national parliamentary institutions as well as to the elected councils that govern and oversee development efforts at district and municipal levels of local government structures. AEPI's uniqueness resides in its approach of peer-to-peer exchanges between parliamentarians as well as specialists in parliamentary capacity building.