15 March, 2022: The President of the Vanuatu Association for Public Service Employees, Dr Basil Leodoro, has urged the Australian government to do more to support a proposal at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that would temporarily lift patent monopolies on COVID19 vaccines, tests and treatments
14 March, 2022: Writing in The Conversation, public health experts Dr Deborah Gleeson and Brigitte Tenni have decried continuing vaccine inequity as the world marks the second anniversary of the COVID19 pandemic.
10 March, 2022: Friday March 11 marks the second anniversary of the World Health Organisation (WHO) declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we enter the third pandemic year, Australians are celebrating high rates of triple vaccination and emergence from lockdowns. But in low-income countries, only 4% have had two vaccine doses, millions are dying and new variants continue to develop.
March 4, 2022: Pandemic of Greed a new Report by Oxfam uses measures of excess deaths to estimate that 19.6 million people have died from COVID-19, over three times the official death toll. Based on this analysis, Oxfam calculated that for every death in a high-income country, an estimated four other people have died in a low or lower-middle income country.
28 February: AFTINET has raised the alarm over the possibility that British corporations will gain the right to sue the Australian Government if the UK is granted membership in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
24 February: In an opinion article in The Guardian, AFTINET Convenor Dr Patricia Ranald has explained how the global trade system is failing to put public health before profit, and what the World Trade Organisation (WTO) must do to address global inequity in access to pandemic medicines
23 February, 2022: Ahead of key meetings at the World Trade Organisation (WTO), AFTINET has joined more than 200 civil society organisations around the world in an open letter calling on the WTO to ensure that any waiver on patent monopolies goes beyond COVID19 vaccines to include treatments and tests.
February 22, 2022 Media Release: The World Trade Organisations (WTO) this week must seize the opportunity to address the global inequity in COVID19 vaccines, tests and treatments, say vaccine equity advocates. While in Australia debate has focused on the availability of free rapid antigen tests (RATs), globally there is inequitable global access to tests, vaccines and treatments that are critical to protecting people from COVID-19.
21 February, 2021: New research from Public Citizen reveals that Pfizer is roadblocking access to COVID19 treatments by filing patent applications in sixty-one countries for nirmatrelvir, a key component of its new COVID19 therapeutic drug, Paxlovid.
February 20, 2022: After a fierce debate, prompted by farmers’ organisations, the Philippines Senate adjourned in February without endorsing the ratification of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) trade agreement between Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, South Korea and the 10 ASEAN countries.