Hundreds of millions of people do not have access to vaccines that could save their lives because they were born in the wrong place. The waiving of patents should have been sorted at the very start, but now millions of lives are at risk due to inaction on the part of von der Leyen, Macron and Merkel, all of whom are in the hands of big pharma. The European Parliament backed a motion to support the waiver. Fine Gael did not support it. Even Joe Biden is now calling for patents to be waived. In all of our names, the European Commission is putting shareholders before citizens. It is putting private profit before public health and delaying production rather than waiving the patents. We have seen unprecedented restrictions on citizens but no rules on the pharma companies whose technology has been funded for decades by taxpayers. AstraZeneca's vaccine was developed with at least 97% of public and charitable funding. Vaccines have been funded by public money yet are very much private goods and so the pandemic becomes a profit-generating machine. There are companies that are prepared to produce these vaccines if a waiver was agreed by the World Trade Organization, and the longer the European Commission delays the decision to waive the vaccine patent, the more we run the risk of new variants emerging.

The final point I will make-----

Senator Warfield is making serious accusations about links to big pharma and I urge caution in that regard.

-----is that this is not only an ethical decision, the EU will be judged on it and it is a big political mistake to make. It does not bode well for the challenges we face in our world and it will have lasting impacts and consequences because the rest of the world will view this as a betrayal.