Final Conference: ‘Health Inequalities: New Methods, Better Insights?’

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Hosted virtually by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) on 8 December, the conference served as the official presentation of the final report produced within the cross-disciplinary ALLEA-FEAM Health Inequalities project.

 

The ALLEA-FEAM report presented at the conference highlights new analytic methods that can help the scientific community to better understand the causal relationship of certain social determinants, such as education, occupational class, and income level, in generating and reproducing health inequalities in Europe. Examples of such new methods include “counterfactual” approaches to assess the causal effect of socio-economic conditions on health, and “natural experiments” to evaluate the to evaluate the impact of policy interventions on health inequalities.

The conference was chaired by Professor Johannes Siegrist, Medical Faculty of the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and member of the ALLEA-FEAM Scientific Committee on Health Inequalities. Speakers included Professor Johan Mackenbach, Director of the Department of Public Health at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam and Chair of the ALLEA-FEAM Scientific Committee; Professor Sjaak Neefjes, Professor of Chemical Immunology at Leiden University Medical Center and KNAW Board Member; and Professor Ana Diez Roux, Professor of Epidemiology at Drexel University, among other experts.

Professor Annette Grüters-Kieslich delivers the closing remarks on behalf of ALLEA.

The closing remarks were delivered by Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics at Charité and ALLEA Vice Pre-sident, Annette Grüters-Kieslich. Professor Grüters-Kieslich praised the interdisciplinary nature of the study and called for a rethinking of research into health inequalities not only at a national level, but also at a European level, as the mechanisms and consequences of inequalities in health transcend political borders. On the value of the report, Professor Grüters-Kieslich remarked:

I am confident that if stakeholders from research, policy, and the wider society come together, there is a potential to see a timely change for the better. The valuable report certainly delivers the necessary data to facilitate immediate actions.

This conference represents the conclusion of the joint ALLEA-FEAM-KNAW project on the topic of health inequalities. You can watch the full conference below or on the KNAW website.

 

 

Read the ALLEA-FEAM report ‘Health Inequalities Research: New methods, better insights?’: Short version / Full report.

Learn more about the ALLEA-FEAM-KNAW joint project on health inequalities here.

 

A Patent Waiver Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Pursuit of Vaccine Equity

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Rather than a World Trade Organization patent waiver, Covid-19 vaccine equity requires measures with immediate effect on the manufacturing and distribution of vaccines in the Global South and improved compulsory licensing mechanisms.

The low level of Covid-19 vaccination in the Global South is ethically unacceptable and risks prolonging the pandemic. The patent waiver in discussion since 2020 within the World Trade Organization (WTO) will not solve these vaccination bottlenecks in the short-term. Instead, additional measures should be adopted to accelerate local manufacturing and distribution of vaccines in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), ramp up investment in vaccination campaigns, and facilitate the compulsory licensing of patents and transfer of know-how.

ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, released a statement today assessing the legal hurdles of the current patent waiver proposal for Covid-19 vaccines within the WTO. It also proposes alternative mechanisms to achieve vaccine equity and speed up the transfer of technology and know-how for vaccine roll-out across LMICs.

In particular, the statement advocates for (i) practical measures that could accelerate the production, export, distribution, and administration of vaccines worldwide and ii) an international mechanism affording additional scrutiny of the manufacturing bottlenecks combined with new measures in the intellectual property (IP) framework such as flexibility for the compulsory licensing of patents.

According to the experts, the current co-sponsored waiver proposal at the WTO is “not well-tailored to the urgent vaccine problem” and would require further national legislation to have any effect in practice. The statement upholds that a WTO waiver would only remove the obligation for WTO Member States to grant IP protection, but would not ensure that stakeholders can effectively benefit from the invention and related know-how.

“A waiver (in the sense of the co-sponsored proposal at the WTO) of IP protection, including of trade secrets, would never make this know how publicly accessible, but only remove the possibility for companies enjoying confidentiality protection to sue for trade secret infringement”, the experts argue.

There are other IPR measures to be considered instead. The WTO waiver debate has opened the floor to other IP fixes that are needed in the field of health. The WTO rules on compulsory licensing of health-related patents should be amended. Important adjustments to patents and trade secret protections should also be adopted by the EU, its Member States, and other countries. In particular, improved procedures and institutional design should help to streamline the process for compulsory licensing on pharmaceutical products, including vaccines.

Read the ALLEA Statement

About this Statement

This ALLEA statement has been prepared by ALLEA’s Permanent Working Group Intellectual Property Rights (PWGIPR) with Professor Alain Strowel as principal author. Through its working groups, ALLEA provides input on behalf of European academies of sciences and humanities to pressing societal, scientific and science-policy debates and their underlying legislation. With its work, ALLEA seeks to ensure that science and research in Europe can excel and serve the interests of society.

 

ALLEA Board Meeting

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UN Proclaims 2022 as the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development

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We need more basic sciences to achieve the Agenda 2030 and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. This is the message sent to the world by the United Nations General Assembly on 2 December 2021. Member States approved by consensus the resolution 76/A/L.12 promulgating the year 2022 as the International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD 2022).

With this resolution, the United Nations General Assembly “invites all [its] Member States, organizations of the United Nations system and other global, regional and subregional organizations, as well as other relevant stakeholders, including academia, civil society, inter alia, international and national nongovernmental organizations, individuals and the private sector, to observe and raise awareness of the importance of basic sciences for sustainable development, in accordance with national priorities”.

The United Nations General Assembly motivated its decision with “the high value for humankind of basic sciences”, and with the fact that “enhanced global awareness of, and increased education in, the basic sciences is vital to attain sustainable development and to improve the quality of life for people all over the world”. It also stressed that “basic sciences and emerging technologies respond to the needs of humankind by providing access to information and increasing the health and well-being of individuals, communities, and societies”.

The successes and difficulties of the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic have been for two years a stark reminder of this importance of basic sciences, such as (but not limited to) biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics and anthropology.

The vote is the result of the mobilization of the international scientific community, led since 2017 by the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), CERN (The European Laboratory for Particle Physics), and 26 other international scientific unions and research organizations from different parts of the world, under the auspices of UNESCO.

Over 90 national and international science academies, learned societies, scientific networks, research and education centers are also supporting this initiative.
They will organize events and activities all over the planet during this special year, to showcase and improve the links between basic sciences and the 17 SDGs. The resolution was proposed to the United Nations General Assembly by Honduras, and co-sponsored by 36 other countries. Its vote confirms resolution 40/C 76 adopted unanimously by UNESCO General Conference, 25 November 2019.

The International Year of Basic Sciences for Sustainable Development (IYBSSD2022) will be officially inaugurated with an opening conference 30 June – 1 July 2022 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Events and activities will be organized around the world until 30 June 2023. ALLEA is an active supporter of the project and part of the network of international science organizations behind this initiative.