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For Immediate Release
September, 22 2021, 02:57pm EDT
Contact:
Mike Stankiewicz, mstankiewicz@citizen.org
Biden's COVID Summit Will Not Meet This Moment
Today, President Joe Biden is convening a virtual COVID-19 summit with world leaders, where he is expected to announce that the U.S. will purchase 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to donate to low- and middle-income countries. Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, issued the following statement:
WASHINGTON
Today, President Joe Biden is convening a virtual COVID-19 summit with world leaders, where he is expected to announce that the U.S. will purchase 500 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine to donate to low- and middle-income countries. Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen's Access to Medicines program, issued the following statement:
"This summit deserves to be, needs to be, a debate of historic dimensions. Wealthy nations are using up the world's vaccine supply, and developing nations are suffering and losing thousands of people every day. It is a fight over access to medicine and the basic right of countries to equip their own pandemic defense.
"But it won't be that kind of debate, and that is deeply disappointing. The summit plan is for a long afternoon of videos, many of them recorded in advance. The hosts are unlikely to be significantly challenged by developing country governments and people at risk of losing their families. This means, as important as the summit is to corral further commitments, it will not produce the transformative response needed to end the pandemic.
"Ending the pandemic is a choice. Leaders at today's summit have yet to make that choice. The White House still has not mobilized all its resources to expand vaccine manufacturing and protect millions more lives that may be lost. Purchasing doses for donation sometime next year is helpful, but it does not meaningfully expand the global supply, and it is not justice.
"The U.S. government has the recipe for the world's most effective COVID-19 vaccine, NIH-Moderna, and can share this knowledge to help make billions more doses in the year ahead. The World Health Organization has established an mRNA manufacturing hub in South Africa and will need far more ambitious support than wealthy countries have offered so far. The U.S. must work with South Africa and other nations among the 100-plus supporters to conclude negotiations in the next weeks of a temporary intellectual property waiver at the World Trade Organization.
"The alternative is to accept enduring pandemic dystopia, in which developing country health agencies are forced to compete for the purchase of scarce and less effective vaccines, with attendant breakthrough infections, death, variants and a longer pandemic for everyone, everywhere."
Public Citizen is a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization that champions the public interest in the halls of power. We defend democracy, resist corporate power and work to ensure that government works for the people - not for big corporations. Founded in 1971, we now have 500,000 members and supporters throughout the country.
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Georgia Fires Entire Maternal Mortality Panel After Reporting on Abortion Ban Deaths
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Georgia officials fired everyone on the Maternal Mortality Review Committee after ProPublicareported that the panel found the deaths of two women whose care was restricted by the state's abortion ban were preventable, the news outlet revealed Thursday.
ProPublica first exposed the committee's findings for Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller in September, sparking a flood of criticism directed at abortion care restrictions and the primarily Republican politicians who impose them. Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, who was running for the White House, even traveled to Atlanta to pay tribute to the two women.
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Thurman and Miller's stories, as the news outlet acknowledged Thursday, "became a central discussion" in not only the presidential contest—ultimately won by Republican President-elect Donald Trump, who has bragged about the role he played in reversing Roe v. Wade—but also ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in 10 states, seven of which succeeded.
In a November 8 letter obtained by ProPublica, Georgia Department of Public Health Commissioner Dr. Kathleen Toomey wrote that an "investigation was unable to uncover which individual(s) disclosed confidential information" despite state law and confidential agreements signed by panel members barring such disclosures.
Toomey explained that the committee was immediately "disbanded," a replacement panel will be formed through a new application process, and additional procedures are under consideration regarding confidentiality, oversight, and organizational structure.
ProPublica reported that the office of Republican Gov. Brian Kemp—who appointed Toomey—declined to comment and referred questions to the health department, whose spokesperson also declined to comment, saying that the letter, "speaks for itself."
As the outlet detailed:
Reproductive rights advocates say Georgia's decision to dismiss and restructure its committee also could have a chilling effect on the committee's work, potentially dissuading its members from delving as deeply as they have into the circumstances of pregnant women's deaths if it could be politically sensitive.
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Other reproductive rights advocates and journalists were similarly critical in response to the new reporting from ProPublica—which has also covered the deaths of two women in Texas: Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain.
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The National Institute for Reproductive Health, an advocacy group, asserted that "when anti-abortion politicians find FACTS inconvenient, they dismantle the systems meant to hold them accountable."
New York magazine senior correspondent Irin Carmon, whose forthcoming book is about pregnancy in the United States, similarly said: "This is how they cover up what abortion bans do—fire anyone who helps tell the stories of harm. Everyone who is or can be pregnant will pay the price."
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The recommendations for charges came after the arrest of four members of the military and a federal police officer earlier this week over an alleged plot to kill Lula and Vice President Geraldo Alckmin before they were sworn in, as well as Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Police said that "a detailed operational plan called 'Green and Yellow Dagger' was identified, which would be executed on December 15, 2022, aimed at the murder of the elected candidates for president and vice president."
According toCNN, "Police reportedly allege that Bolsonaro had 'full knowledge' of a plan to prevent Lula and his government from taking office after his election victory."
Summarizing a conversation with a columnist, Bolsonaro said on social media Thursday that "we have to see what is in this indictment by the Federal Police. I will wait for the lawyer." He also said that Moraes "does everything that the law does not say" and "I cannot expect anything from a team that uses creativity to denounce me."
Bolsonaro has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, including with two other pending cases: In March he was indicted for allegedly falsifying his Covid-19 vaccination data and in July he was indicted for crimes including embezzlement related to alleged misappropriation of diamond jewelry and other state property. Those indictments came after Brazil's highest election authority last year barred him from running for any public office for eight years over his lies about the 2022 contest.
In addition to Bolsonaro, the other three dozen people indicted on Thursday include "some of the most important members of his far-right administration," The Guardianreported. As the newspaper detailed:
They included Bolsonaro's former spy chief, the far-right Congressman Alexandre Ramagem; the former defense ministers, Gen. Walter Braga Netto and Gen. Paulo Sérgio Nogueira de Oliveira; the former minister of justice and public security, Anderson Torres; the former minister of institutional security, Gen. Augusto Heleno; the former navy commander Adm. Almir Garnier Santos; the president of Bolsonaro's political party, Valdemar Costa Neto; and Filipe Martins, one of Bolsonaro's top foreign policy advisers.
Also named is the right-wing blogger grandson of Gen. João Baptista Figueiredo, one of the military rulers who governed Brazil during its 1964-85 dictatorship.
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"The clock is ticking. COP29 is now down to the wire," said UN Secretary-General António Guterres on Thursday, just a day before the two-week conference is set to conclude.
Finance has been a major focus of this year's summit. Under the 20125 Paris Agreement, countries are supposed to come up with a "new collective quantified goal"—or NCQG in COP jargon—that will govern how much money from rich countries will be transferred to developing countries in order to help the latter cut their emissions and adapt to climate change.
No equivalent climate finance arrangement has been agreed to before, though countries at the summit broadly agree that richer countries, who are responsible for much of historic CO2 emissions, should help poorer and more climate-vulnerable nations deal with natural disasters and their transition to green energy.
The draft text that dropped early Thursday, however, was received poorly.
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Instead of specifying how much annually should be funneled towards developing countries via climate finance, the NCQG draft text displayed "X" in place of any actual figures or monetary commitments.
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Without addressing these concerns, advocates of a meaningful deal at the conference say COP29 is headed for failure.
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