We’re Moving Along Nicely……
Three weeks in and so far nearly 11,000 people have submitted over 90,000 emails directly to the CEOs of drug companies. This is great news! So far we are live in the US, UK, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, France, Luxembourg, Sweden, Brazil, and the Czech Republic. Ça roule !!
Events
We have had two events over the past week related to the push for the patent pool, one in Brussels and another in Geneva.
Spreading the word wherever we can
The beauty of online campaigning is that it ends up in places you wouldn’t really imagine.
In the UK, our webmaster’s football team have signed up to a man. In addition, the Campaign director’s suitcase came back from a recent trip to Washington D.C. bulging with letters signed by attendees of this October’s American Academy of Pediatrics Conference.
And in Brussels, five members of the European Parliament (EP) cross-political groups, have introduced a written declaration calling for the EU to support the UNITAID patent pool and calling for the pharmaceutical industries to put their HIV/AIDS related patents in the pool – once 368 MEPs have signed the Declaration, it will become an official EP, as a whole, statement in support of the patent pool.
>> Download a copy of the written declaration
Quote of the Week
"We are sitting on a treatment time bomb. We must reduce the price of second-line medicines and less toxic first-line medicines before millions need them. We cannot sleepwalk into a situation where we can only afford to treat a tiny proportion of those infected." David Borrow, British MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on AIDS. The report states that the numbers of people living with HIV will rise five-fold to 50 million by 2030.
Updates from the drug companies
Most drug companies have now made contact with UNITAID about the patent pool as a result of our campaign. This is great news and we need to keep the pressure up on them to commit publicly to the pool.