one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine makers appears to have restricted — appears to have restricted access to those very vaccines. The People’s Vaccine Alliance says just 14% of the 1.8 billion doses rich nations promised to donate have been delivered so far. And this week Germany said it expected to miss its target to donate 100 million doses this year, due in part to legal restrictions imposed by vaccine manufacturers.
We are in the worst public health crisis in over a century, and Pfizer has used its monopoly over a life-saving vaccine, a remarkable vaccine, to extract really concerning concessions from desperate governments around the world. And so we detail six examples. And I should say that the contracts are mostly the same, but there are variations within each contract. But almost all the contracts contain, for example, a provision that allows Pfizer to control, essentially, what is said about the contracts. Almost all the contracts contain a provision that says, if there is a vaccine shortage, then Pfizer gets to unilaterally decide what the priority of deliveries is, and the countries will simply accept those terms. There’s provisions about donations, and Pfizer gets to say whether a country can either donate a Pfizer vaccine or even accept a donated Pfizer vaccine. And so, there’s just all kinds of things in these contracts.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 22, 2021