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By insisting COVID-19 vaccines remain under the control of big pharmaceutical companies under their TRIPS-mandated 20-year monopoly patents, the WTO has effectively restricted access to these life-saving vaccines especially for countries who need them the most.
For Joshua San Pedro, co-convenor of the Coalition for People’s Right to Health, data on vaccine distribution in the country is anything but transparent.
Our country, with the myriad of problems in our healthcare system even before the pandemic, is simply not equipped to adequately deal with the possible harmful effects of these clinical trials on its Filipino participants. Alongside the questionable small-scale trials of the vaccine leading up to this point and the speed at which these trials were conducted (vaccines typically take years to develop), we have all the reasons not to participate, yet here we are, once again knocking on the door of quite probably another bad decision.
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