PrEP4All & Dozens of Global Activists Storm Stage at #AIDS2022 to Demand Global Access on Monkeypox
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Montreal, Quebec. Canada. On Monday, August 1, a group of activists and advocates from across the world stormed the stage at AIDS2022, the International AIDS Conference in Montreal, Canada during a special session on the global monkeypox outbreak, calling for immediate action from the World Health Organization (WHO) the United Nations (UN) and from U.S. government agencies including The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) to stop the global spread of this disease.
“We keep hearing in all these sessions [at the conference] that ‘healthcare is a human right,’ but we need to ask what our late colleague Paul Farmer asked ‘if healthcare is a human right who do you all consider human enough to have access to that right?,” asked James Krellenstein, Managing Director of Policy and Strategy with PrEP4ALL. “We need to act now. We’re in a worsening outbreak that could have easily been prevented.”
In a presentation during the same session that preceded the action by global activists, Meg Doherty, M.D., Ph.D., of WHO confirmed that we have seen the rapid spread of Monkeypox in recent months to now have more than 20,000 cases across 78 of WHO member states. She went on to state that 16.4 million doses of the monkeypox vaccine made by the Danish manufacturer Bavarian Nordic are currently in existence, most of which has been purchased by the U.S. and Western countries, leaving the rest of the world to fend for themselves. This amount of vaccine is far short of the demand for at risk communities, which is currently men who have sex with men, who currently make up 98% of global cases, but we’re beginning to see cases in children, cisgender women and others.
“Central and Western Africa has been fighting this virus since the 1970s, but no one ever talked about it because it wasn’t [a virus affecting] white bodies,” said Naïké Ledan, Associate Director of International Policy & Advocacy, HealthGAP. “We’re demanding immediate equitable global sharing of supplies of testing, treatments, and vaccines. We’re demanding rejection of any and all intellectual property, because it’s a global crisis, not an opportunity to make money again.”
Activists demanded that the United States, Canada, the European Union and other high-income countries make good on their commitment to be a “vaccine arsenal for the world.” The group has also addressed the need for global funding to support further research into vaccines and treatments without jeopardizing the ongoing responses to HIV, TB, HCV, STI or other public health issues.
“Coming together this week, we’ve all heard how the global network of community organisations, researchers, clinicians, and others in the ongoing response to HIV and AIDS have been heavily leaned on to use their experience and knowledge to address emerging issues like COVID-19 and now Monkeypox, said Emily Bass, Senior Policy Advisor on COVID-19 with PrEP4All. “We need to increase capacity rather than jeopardise the momentum we have in addressing long standing increase capacity to address today’s simultaneous pandemics and the ones to come”
To read the full list of demands, visit https://www.prep4all.org/monkeypox.
For more information please contact:
James Krellenstein; james@prep4all.org; +1 (516) 965-7707
Jessica Bassett; jessica@healthgap.org; +1 (929) 866-3929