The campaign, entitled “A dose of equality: for universal access to vaccination covid-19”, starts with a petition, available on the organization's website (https://www.amnistia.pt/peticao/vacina-covid-19), in which it calls on pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge and technology to maximize the number of doses of covid-19 vaccines worldwide.
According to AI, rich countries bought more than half of the world's supply of vaccines, although they represent only 16 percent of the world's population.
The same countries have administered more than 60 percent of the world's doses so far, while more than 100 countries have not yet vaccinated a single person.
The non-governmental organization (NGO) calls on states to stop engaging in "vaccine nationalism" and work together to ensure that those most at risk of contracting covid-19 in all countries can access vaccines.
The organization recalls that billions of dollars of taxpayer money have been spent to help companies like AstraZeneca, Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech develop and produce vaccines, but these companies - and others - refuse to share research, knowledge and technology.
This means, according to AI, other pharmaceutical companies cannot take advantage of these advances in science to increase their own vaccine production, which in turn would increase the supply of vaccines so that they are accessible to countries with smaller budgets.
For example, in May 2020, the World Health Organization created the Covid-19 Technology Access Group (Covid-19 Technology Access Pool / C-TAP) so that companies could gather data and knowledge and then license the production and transfer of technology to other potential producers, with the aim of ensuring that people everywhere could have access to vaccines more quickly.
However, until now, no pharmaceutical company has adhered to C-TAP.