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Moderna Must Share Technology to Ensure Vaccine Breakthrough Is Not Limited to Rich Countries
Responding to the announcement that US biotech company Moderna says its new vaccine is 94.5 percent effective against COVID-19, Stephen Cockburn, Amnesty International's Head of Economic and Social Justice Program, said:
"Having already sold most of its potential 2021 vaccine supply to rich countries, Moderna must follow through on its promise to allow others to make the vaccine, and provide the knowledge and technology to do so, once the vaccine has proven to be safe and effective.
WASHINGTON
Responding to the announcement that US biotech company Moderna says its new vaccine is 94.5 percent effective against COVID-19, Stephen Cockburn, Amnesty International's Head of Economic and Social Justice Program, said:
"Having already sold most of its potential 2021 vaccine supply to rich countries, Moderna must follow through on its promise to allow others to make the vaccine, and provide the knowledge and technology to do so, once the vaccine has proven to be safe and effective.
"Companies like Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have a responsibility to respect human rights, and they should play a leading role towards a global solution to COVID-19 by sharing and ensuring affordable prices. They must not act in a way that allows governments to hoard vaccines for a privileged few.
"We can only put an end to COVID-19 if companies ensure that those most in need of life-saving vaccines are not left behind. It's time for companies to live up to their human rights responsibilities and ensure the widest possible access to their innovations."
BACKGROUND
To date, Moderna is the only company that has committed to not enforce its intellectual property rights and allow others to make the vaccine.
Moderna says it can manufacture between 500 million and 1billion vaccine doses in 2021 (two doses per person needed), but it has only struck deals with rich countries that may account for the majority of these. The US has paid for 100 million doses already, with an option of a further 500 million. Canada has ordered 56 million, Japan 50 million, and the European Commission completed advanced talks with Moderna for up to 160 million doses. As these negotiations tend to be done behind closed doors, additional deals could also be underway.
This announcement follows a UN Special Rapporteurs statement on November 9, which highlighted that companies "should refrain from causing or contributing to adverse impacts on the rights to life and health by invoking their intellectual property rights and prioritizing economic gains."
Under international law, companies have a responsibility to respect human rights and, among others, must not impede States' efforts to realize the right to health and access to medicines.
This statement is available at: https://www.amnestyusa.org/press-releases/moderna-must-share-technology-to-ensure-vaccine-breakthrough-is-not-limited-to-rich-countries/
Follow @amnestyusa on Twitter, Instagram @amnestyusa, and Facebook FB.com/amnestyusa.
Amnesty International is a global movement of millions of people demanding human rights for all people - no matter who they are or where they are. We are the world's largest grassroots human rights organization.
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Critics Warn Corporate Media Is Failing in Face of White House Lies About Alex Pretti
"There were lies," former CNN anchor Jim Acosta said of the Trump administration's response to Pretti's death. "Lie after lie after lie.
Jan 26, 2026
Two prominent critics warned on Monday that the US corporate media is not being aggressive enough in calling out the Trump administration's lies about Alex Pretti, the Minneapolis resident who was slain by federal immigration agents over the weekend.
Writing on her Substack page, former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan expressed concern that many mainstream media publications were taking a wait-and-see approach in the wake of Pretti's shooting, even as the Trump administration, Fox News, and other right-wing media websites were pumping out false claims about Pretti brandishing a weapon at federal officials and being a "domestic terrorist."
Sullivan did praise many outlets, including the Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, for doing detailed and accurate breakdowns of videos showing Pretti's fatal encounter with federal agents.
However, she was dismayed that these outlets frequently hedged their language by saying that video evidence of the Pretti killing merely "appears to" contradict the administration's claims.
"If the analyses do indeed 'directly contradict' the government’s claims, then say so—without fear or favor, as the motto goes," Sullivan emphasized. "With what amounts to civil war raging in the United States, we desperately need clear, fearless truth-telling that doesn’t pull its punches and doesn’t hand a megaphone to lies and propaganda in the name of supposed fairness."
Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta similarly criticized US media outlets for being too timid in contradicting the administration's lies about the Pretti killing.
On his own Substack page, Acosta argued that "the truth immediately came under assault" after federal agents fatally shot Pretti.
Despite possessing video evidence that showed the administration was lying about Pretti's death, Acosta wrote, too many mainstream news outlets "tiptoed around the truth" rather than stating it plainly.
"There were lies," Acosta said of the administration's response. "Lie after lie after lie. The videos from the scene did more than just 'contradict' the government account of what occurred, as the [Wall Street Journal] described it. The reality is that the eyewitness footage revealed that the administration was flat out lying to the public. Our eyes and ears told us what happened. Too many news reports simply chose not to reflect that.
Acosta reserved particular scorn for Politico, which ran a headline stating that "a battle over the truth erupts after deadly Minneapolis shooting," even though multiple videos of the incident had already been published showing exactly what the truth was.
"Federal officials, like [Stephen] Miller, were lying," Acosta said, referring to Trump's deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser. "Full stop. Politico needed to say that."
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NYC's Speedy Snow Removal Under Mamdani Evokes Memories of 'Sewer Socialism'
The mayor’s response to the blizzard has been described as an early test for his version of “common good” governance.
Jan 26, 2026
"God Bless sewer socialism." That's what historian David Austin Walsh had to say about New York City's swift response to the largest blizzard it's seen in five years, which dumped over a foot of snow on the five boroughs this weekend.
The blizzard, part of Winter Storm Fern, which has ravaged the Northeastern United States, presented an early test for the city's left-wing mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who centered his insurgent campaign last year not simply on providing new free municipal services, but on making the ones New Yorkers already relied upon, like sanitation, more robust and accessible.
It was an agenda that led him to be compared to a breed of socialist mayor who focused less on lofty ideas and revolutionary rhetoric and more on using the power of government to remedy the everyday concerns of the public.
In October, just weeks before Mamdani's triumph in the general election, columnist E. J. Dionne Jr. wrote in the New York Times:
For history buffs, Mr. Mamdani has done the service of rekindling an interest in a largely forgotten American tradition, the “sewer socialists” who ran a significant list of cities in the last century. The most durable among them was Daniel Hoan, the socialist mayor of Milwaukee from 1916 to 1940. You don’t get reelected that often by being a failure.
Many socialist mayors did not mind being associated with repairing the grubbiest of urban amenities because doing so underscored their aim of running corruption-free governments that did whatever they could to improve the lives of working-class people in their jurisdictions. When lousy (or nonexistent) sewer systems led to illness and death in low-income and immigrant neighborhoods, said Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown University, building and fixing sewers became a powerful example of what “common good” governance could accomplish.
Mr. Mamdani knows sewer socialism’s history and has no qualms about identifying with it.
This weekend was the first opportunity for New York's youngest mayor in over a century to put this philosophy into action in a test of competence that past mayors have infamously failed—from Bill de Blasio, who was lambasted over the underplowing of certain neighborhoods, to Michael Bloomberg, who took heat for ditching the blizzard conditions for Bermuda, to John Lindsay, whose disastrous lack of preparation for a 1969 blizzard resulted in the deaths of at least 42 people.
As Walsh wrote on Friday, with the storm prepared to bear down, "Mamdani has a unique opportunity to prove that sewer socialism works, but the crucial first test is going to be not fucking up the snowstorm this weekend."
By then, Mamdani's preparations had long since begun, with the city fitting thousands of sanitation department trucks with snowplows, brining every highway and street in the city to make cleanup easier, and ensuring that enough shelter beds were available to protect those without homes from the elements.
The mayor also undertook a robust yet simple effort to communicate with New Yorkers about practical guidelines to stay safe through a series of upbeat PSAs and appearances on local news.
"Make no mistake, New Yorkers, the full power of this city's enormous resources is prepared, poised, and ready to be deployed," Mamdani said during a press conference on Saturday. "Every agency is working in lockstep with the other."
Though death tolls were considerably lower than in other storms of its magnitude, the blizzard did not pass without tragedy. At least one homeless man reportedly froze to death, while another six people have been found dead outside, though it's unclear if these deaths were weather-related.
But in all, the Times said "the city largely appeared to be prepared for the weather."
Crews headed out to begin clearing roads at 8:30 am, when precipitation had reached the requisite two inches; shortly after 7 pm, [Department of Sanitation spokesperson Joshua Goodman] said every single street under city control had been plowed at least twice; tens of millions of pounds of salt had been spread across the five boroughs; and 2,500 sanitation workers were rotating on 12-hour shifts to continue the cleanup.
Mamdani, meanwhile, was praised for his active role in the cleanup effort and for maintaining high visibility, where past mayors were accused of shirking into the background.
One widely shared video shows the mayor personally shoveling snow to free a stranded driver in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, home to a large Hasidic Jewish community.
Rabbi Moishe Indig, the executive vice president of the Jewish Community Council of Williamsburg, called it "hands-on leadership."
Even one of Mamdani's fiercest critics, Benny Polatseck, an aide to former Mayor Eric Adams, was complimentary to his response.
“Credit where due," he wrote Sunday afternoon on social media. "Looks like [Mamdani] is handling this storm very well so far."
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'Moral and Political Debacle': Right-Wing Media, CEOs Urge Trump to Stop Deadly ICE Crackdown
"The American people didn’t vote for these scenes and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes,” the New York Post editorial board wrote.
Jan 26, 2026
"The Trump administration spin on this simply isn’t believable."
That's what the editorial board of the right-wing Wall Street Journal wrote Sunday calling for a "pause" in Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) anti-immigrant blitz following Saturday's killing of 37-year-old intensive care nurse Alex Petti—who was disarmed before being shot by federal agents in Minneapolis—and top administration officials' claims that the man who helped save US military veterans' lives was a "domestic terrorist."
The Journal's editors called Pretti's killing “the worst incident to date in what is becoming a moral and political debacle” for President Donald Trump and his administration.
The Journal wasn't alone. Other right-wing outlets owned by the Murdoch media empire, including the New York Post, published editorials calling for a suspension of Trump's crackdown on undocumented immigrants, during which dozens of people have died in ICE custody and federal enforcers have killed two Americans. Even staunchly pro-Trump Fox News challenged administration officials over the shooting.
"It's time to de-escalate in Minneapolis, Mr. President," the Post's editorial board wrote Sunday.
"Not because you’re wrong to enforce immigration law, nor to go after fraudsters who’ve stolen billions in federal funds—but because these enforcement tactics won’t turn the tide, and instead are backfiring," the editors clarified. "Swing voters—Hispanics and independents who turned to you at the last election—see US citizens dying at federal agents’ hands, and recoil in horror."
"The hasty and misleading rhetoric coming out of the administration needs to stop," the Post said. "And while Pretti was horribly misguided, there is no evidence he was a 'terrorist' intent on a 'massacre' of law enforcement."
As they did with Renee Good, the 37-year-old mother and poet who was shot dead by an ICE agent in Minneapolis earlier this month, Trump and some of his senior officials accused Pretti of being a "domestic terrorist"—a move in line with the administration's designation of left-wing activism as terrorism.
US Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino said that it looked like Pretti—who eyewitnesses said died while trying to help a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by ICE—“wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement."
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller attempted to smear Pretti as an "assassin" who "tried to murder federal agents."
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem accused Pretti of "domestic terrorism."
As the Wall Street Journal's editors put it, "Alex Pretti made a mistake, but he wasn’t a ‘domestic terrorist.'"
"Videos of an event aren’t always definitive, but this is how it looks to us," they wrote. "Pretti attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents. Multiple agents then tackled Pretti, and he had a phone in one hand as he lay on the ground. An agent discovered a concealed gun on Pretti, and disarmed him. An agent then shot Pretti, and multiple shots followed."
The Post editors concluded, "Mr. President, the American people didn’t vote for these scenes, and you can’t continue to order them to not believe their lying eyes."
Meanwhile, more than 60 CEOs of Minnesota-based companies including Target, Best Buy, UnitedHealth, 3M, and General Mills published an open letter Sunday calling for "an immediate deescalation of tensions and for state, local, and federal officials to work together to find real solutions."
Gun rights groups including the National Rifle Association have called for a full investigation of Pretti's killing. The NRA pushed back against arguments that Pretti should not have brought a gun—which he was legally carrying—to a protest, calling such assertions "dangerous and wrong."
"Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation, not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens," added the NRA, which was criticized for its initial silence following the killing of Philando Castile, a Black man who was legally carrying a gun when he was shot dead by police in front of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter during a 2016 traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis.
Even Republican lawmakers who support Trump have expressed their dismay over Pretti's killing, with Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana calling the incident "incredibly disturbing."
Chris Madel, an attorney who provided legal counsel to Jonathan Ross—the ICE agent who killed Good—was, until Monday, also a Republican candidate for Minnesota governor. However, Madel said that he dropped out of the race and implied that he would quit the GOP because he “cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state."
“Nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so," he said.
I am ending my campaign for Minnesota Governor. I describe why in the below video. Please watch until the end. (It is 10 minutes, 52 seconds.)
Thank you,
Chris pic.twitter.com/2nfyAyTzNZ
— Chris Madel (@CWMadel) January 26, 2026
" United States citizens, particularly those of color, live in fear," Madel continued. "United States citizens are carrying papers to prove their citizenship. That’s wrong."
“At the end of the day, I have to look my daughters in the eye and tell them I believe I did what is right," he added. "I am doing that today."
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