[CTC] ICYMI: Activists protest ‘global inaction’ at homes of Biden chief of staff and Moderna CEO

Fri Oct 1 04:59:27 PDT 2021

Two articles below...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/us/politics/biden-aids-activists-covid-vaccine.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/us/politics/biden-aids-activists-covid-vaccine.html>

Activists take vaccine demands, and a mountain of fake bones, to the home of Biden’s chief of staff.
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg 
9/29/2021

Activists outside the home of Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff, on Wednesday. (Michael A. McCoy for The New York Times)

A small band of longtime AIDS activists, fed up with what they regard as President Biden’s failure to scale up coronavirus vaccine manufacturing for global use, deposited a fake mountain of bones outside the home of Ron Klain, his chief of staff, on Wednesday to represent the lives that they say have been lost to the president’s inaction.

The activists, some of them veterans of much larger protests that played out at the National Institutes of Health more than 30 years ago, had already made similar demands in private phone calls with administration officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a target of early AIDS protests who later became the activists’ ally.

But the calls got them nowhere, they said. So they decided to try more old-fashioned, in-your-face tactics.

The mountain of bones, they said, was made by a set designer in New York. They planted it in front of Mr. Klain’s next-door neighbor’s driveway to avoid running afoul of the Secret Service agents guarding Mr. Klain’s house. The agents eventually asked them politely to leave.

“Nobody wants to be here in front of Ron Klain’s house, protesting a president that most of us all voted for,” said Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale University epidemiologist whose activism on behalf of people with AIDS led to a career in academia and a 2018 MacArthur “genius” grant <https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2018/gregg-gonsalves>. “But we’ve tried everything else.”

He defended the decision to show up at the private home of an unelected administration official.

“What is it — four million deaths, six million deaths, 10 million deaths — where we can show up on somebody’s lawn and hold them accountable?” Dr. Gonsalves said. More than 4.7 million people are known to have died worldwide from Covid-19, and analyses of excess mortalities around the world <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html> suggests that the actual number is far higher.

“They represent the public,” Dr. Gonsalves said of public servants. “We pay their salaries. They’re not listening to the American public, they’re not listening to the global public, they’re not listening to scientific advice. So this is the least we can do.”

A White House spokesman said in a statement that the administration had taken “decisive and urgent action to save lives,” including by buying more than one billion vaccine doses to donate overseas and working with manufacturers in India and South Africa to increase vaccine production.

“These are shots that are going into arms now and in the immediate months to come,” said the spokesman, Kevin Munoz. “We’re pushing the world to step and do more immediately as well.”

The protest at the Klain home in the Washington suburbs was one of two “vaccine equity demonstrations” on Wednesday by AIDS advocacy groups, including Prep4All and Right 2 Health Action. The other was at the Boston home of Stephane Bancel, the chief executive officer of Moderna, whose Covid-19 vaccine was developed with backing from American taxpayers.

With less than 10 percent of people in many poor nations <https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html> fully vaccinated and a dearth of doses contributing to the suffering of millions, pressure has been growing on both Mr. Biden and drug makers <https://twitter.com/SherylNYT/status/1443279081211060228> to provide more low-cost vaccines to the world.

Mr. Biden says the United States is doing more than any other nation to address the pandemic. Last week, at a virtual Covid-19 summit that he convened on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, he said that his administration had bought an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to donate overseas, bringing the total to about 1.1 billion.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/29/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/#link-XGUAPD4YRFCINME5KLCGKXF5TY <https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/29/covid-delta-variant-live-updates/#link-XGUAPD4YRFCINME5KLCGKXF5TY>

Activists protest ‘global inaction’ at homes of Biden chief of staff and Moderna CEO
By Dan Diamond 
9/30/2021

From left, James Krellenstein, Gregg Gonsalves and Peter Staley protest outside the home of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain in Chevy Chase, Md., on Sept. 29, calling for worldwide distribution of coronavirus vaccines. (Amanda Andrade-Rhoades for The Washington Post)

Global health advocates protested in front of the home of White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain on Wednesday, setting up a 12-foot pile of fake bones they said symbolized American inaction in combating the global coronavirus crisis.

“He’s giving Biden bad advice,” said Asia Russell, executive director of Health Gap, an international advocacy organization. She called for Klain to be fired.

The advocates said that a lack of vaccine abroad was leading to preventable deaths and increasing the risk that new variants will emerge. About 55 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated against the virus, compared with about 33 percent around the globe and about 4 percent in Africa, according to the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data project.

Advocacy groups have spent months urging the Biden administration <https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/08/10/health-experts-demand-global-vaccines-pandemic/?itid=lk_inline_manual_17> to take additional action, such as pressuring vaccine makers to share their intellectual property with developing countries, setting up regional manufacturing hubs overseas and sharing more doses that the U.S. government has stockpiled.

The advocates also said that they were frustrated that the U.S. government had not organized a more defined structure to address global inequities.

“One of the reasons we targeted Mr. Klain is because of one of the biggest problems that we see in this administration’s response — there’s not a single person and a single chain of command that is dedicated to dealing with the international issues,” said James Krellenstein, who is a co-founder of the HIV-prevention group PrEP4All and helped organize Wednesday’s protest.

The group also included longtime HIV/AIDS activists Peter Staley and Gregg Gonsalves, who defended the decision to protest outside of Klain’s personal residence, contending that they had repeatedly tried to sway U.S. officials through standard channels. The activists said that they had regularly met with leaders such as Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-diseases expert, and White House coronavirus coordinator Jeffrey Zients and that they hoped those meetings would continue.

White House officials defended the administration’s record, citing its initiative <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/22/zients-blinken-covid-vaccines-america-world/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23&itid=lk_inline_manual_21> to donate more than 1.1 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine abroad as “decisive and urgent action to save lives right now."

”These are shots that are going into arms now and in the immediate months to come," said White House spokesman Kevin Munoz, adding that the White House was working to boost manufacturing in countries like Senegal and South Africa, address global supply chain constraints and encourage more donations. President Biden last week also called on global leaders <https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/13/biden-covid-global-leaders/?itid=lk_inline_manual_23&itid=lk_inline_manual_22> to commit to fully vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s population by next September.

Advocates held a similar protest Wednesday outside the home of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel in Boston. It included a live video stream from other activists and public health experts, such as Georgetown University’s Lawrence Gostin. Moderna, which took billions of dollars in federal funds to develop its vaccine, has been a source of frustration for advocates who say that it has yet to share its intellectual property and know-how with other governments and companies that could make generic versions of its vaccine.

Krellenstein said that further protests, including civil disobedience, could follow if the U.S. government does not act swiftly to confront the global crisis.

The activists dispersed when police arrived at Klain’s house.

The White House has touted its actions to fight the pandemic abroad, including an initiative <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/22/zients-blinken-covid-vaccines-america-world/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26> to donate more than 1.1 billion doses of coronavirus vaccine and a summit led last week by President Biden, who called on global leaders <https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/13/biden-covid-global-leaders/?itid=lk_inline_manual_26> to commit to fully vaccinating 70 percent of the world’s population by next September.

Arthur Stamoulis
Citizens Trade Campaign
(202) 494-8826

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