Dear Prime Minister,

We write to you on behalf of the Sustainable Health Equity Movement (SHEM), a coalition of several institutions and representatives of the global civil society that unites more than 500 entities and around 20 million scientists and health professionals from around the world.

As a movement, we are deeply committed to the right to health for all. We have witnessed, in our daily practice, the unbearable sufferance that the Covid-19 has brought upon the most vulnerable, taking the lives of over 6 million people, and causing immense grief among their families and friends.

We, health professionals and advocates, make ours the mission of saving lives from the scourge of the pandemic. Everything we know suggests the pandemic is decreasing, but it is not evenly affecting less developed countries, which reflects the difficulty in accessing the tools to combat it.

It is a well-established fact that vaccination is the most important tool we have to halt the spread, but it is only effective if everybody is vaccinated. Nobody is safe until everybody is safe, is not only a mantra, it is true. It is also the only way to get back onboard and fuel the economy, that needs to be a sustainable one, planet friendly.

We congratulate you, as Chair of the G7, on aiming to create a set of global health initiatives with a view to assure health for all and to protect us all from future pandemics, and express our support to the G7 Health Ministers’ communique issued on June 4.

In that context, we urge G7 Leaders to support the widest patent waiver proposal, as well as robust support for and specific measures to facilitate technology transfer in order to increase the availability of not only vaccines, but of everything needed to help us save lives.

We ask that the G7 Leaders respond to the request of the Leaders of WHO, IMF, WTO and World Bank, immediately providing the necessary financial resources to immunize the entire population of the world as quickly as possible.

The world will recognize the gesture and will be ever thankful of the drive of the G7 to save the lives that the pandemic is taking away.

Related Project