LAHORE: Activists belonging to a civil society organisation made a human chain here on Tuesday to seek an end to the monopoly of pharmaceutical corporations on vaccine manufacturing and to demand that the government should allocate more funds for public healthcare systems.

By holding each other’s hands, the activists of Labour Education Foundation also showed solidarity with the victims of Covid-19 pandemic who died because of the government’s failure to provide them timely healthcare, including tests, treatment and vaccines, as well as with the heroes, doctors and paramedical staff who served the ailing masses during the pandemic.

Raising slogans against the pharma industry for preferring profit over human lives by declining to transfer technology to the poor nations for local and affordable manufacturing of vaccines, tests and treatments for deadly diseases, they called for a global strategy under the World Health Organization (WHO) to better prepare the world for future health crises likely to hit the world because of climate change.

They demanded that life-saving vaccines and medicines should be produced under generic names to lower their prices for making them accessible to the poor peoples and advocated for at least a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights (IPR) by the World Trade Organization for all vaccines against lethal diseases.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2023