Online event · Jan 28 2022, 3pm CET

Inequalities in Covid-19 Vaccine Distribution

Disruptive Fridays #28

With: Sarai Keestra and Till Bruckner.
Live at https://www.disruptionlab.org/fridays

Increasing transparency in the funding of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

Sarai Keestra (MD/PhD student at the University of Amsterdam, Member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines – UAEM, NL/UK) and Till Bruckner (PhD, Founder, TranspariMED, UK).

The AstraZeneca vaccine is the world's most widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine, being used in 178 countries and territories. This versatile vaccine platform, which may have important applications beyond COVID-19, is the result of two decades of research at the University of Oxford. In 2020 a group of medical students and early career researchers from the global student network Universities Allied for Essential Medicines came together with the goal of increasing transparency and public accountability in the funding base of this research. Their research revealed that the great majority of the early vaccine development at the University of Oxford was funded by charitable organisations and the public sector. These findings, which were recently published in the BMJ Global Health (https://gh.bmj.com/content/6/12/e007321) contributed the discourse around global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and sparked debate around the terms of the commercialisation of the publicly funded vaccine research at the University. Using Freedom of Information Requests, they also gained access to the technology transfer agreement between Oxford and AstraZeneca,shedding new light on the implementation of access commitments during a pandemic. In this Disruptive Friday session we will learn more about inequalities in COVID-19 vaccine distribution and using freedom of information requests to increase transparency from public institutions.

SPEAKERS:

Sarai Keestra is a MD/PhD student at the University of Amsterdam and a member of Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM). UAEM is a global student network promoting access to health technologies such as vaccines or medicines, by changing our universities’ research, patenting, and licensing decisions. Within UAEM Sarai focusses on equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines, clinical trial transparency, and university technology transfer. She was UAEM UK's national coordinator between 2018-2019 and at the start of the pandemic co-led UAEM UK‘s national campaign on COVID-19 health technologies. Before studying medicine, Sarai worked as a research assistant in medical anthropology at the University of Oxford and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

Till Bruckner is the founder of TranspariMED, a campaign that works to end evidence distortion in medicine. He is passionate about using advocacy to achieve real, measurable impact in improving the world. He previously worked for the AllTrials campaign, the Transparify campaign, the anti-corruption group Transparency International, and for various NGOs and think tanks in the Caucasus, Afghanistan and Northwest Africa. Till holds a PhD in political science from the University of Bristol.

The event is part of the Disruption Network Lab programme series Challenging Corruption: Empowering Future Voices funded by GIZ (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit) as commissioned by the government of the Federal Republic of Germany.