In December at the UNITAID board meeting the patent pool proposal was accepted!!! Right now UNITAID are recruiting board members to take the patent pool forward, this means sorting out its legal identity and beginning to enter in to formal discussions with Pharma over how a patent pool would work. Although it is necessary to keep up pressure on Pharma to give up their patents, it is also important that the pharmaceuticals and Unitaid are given a few months to begin these discussions unbothered.

However at the 2009 UNITAID meeting some conditions were created, which means that, if by December 2010 the conditions have not been met,  there will be another look at whether we should go ahead with the patent pool proposal. Obviously we do not want to see the patent pool fail, so it has been suggested that we give them some time to talk before coming back to UNITAID in the summer to see how discussions with Pharma are going and see how we can best help from then.

In the mean time many of you may have heard about the Robin Hood Tax, this is a new campaign launched by a coalition of organisations. The tax would be aimed at all global financial transaction such as global currency exchanges, derivatives, stocks and shares etc, and would be set at 0.05%!

The Tax would look to bring in £400 Billion a year. This would be split 50% going to domestic issues such as child poverty, 25% for climate change, and 25% for the health Millennium Development Goals. £100 Billion for the health MDGS would be amazing and if channeled through the Global Fund, as we are pushing for, would help to prevent the funding gap currently facing the fund!

At the February Training everyone sat down together to discuss the pro’s and con’s of the Student Stop AIDS Campaign supporting the Robin Hood Tax, and it was agreed that this was something we should do!

Please see http://www.robinhoodtax.org.uk and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYtNwmXKIvM for more information.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 11:28 am and is filed under Campaign News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.