Activists have blocked the entrance to a Cambridge AstraZeneca site where its AGM is being held to demand that the COVID-19 injection be designated a “People’s Vaccine’.
Cambridgeshire Police are in attendance at the protest in Hills Road by Global Justice Now, which is demanding that the Cambridge-based pharmaceutical giant openly licence their vaccine and commits to sharing the technology with the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Global Justice Now's director, Nick Dearden, explained: "Scientists at Oxford University, a publicly-funded institution, developed this life-saving vaccine through a research and development process that was 97% publicly funded.
"The resulting vaccine should have been openly accessible to everyone, but AstraZeneca swooped in and privatised it."
Protesters from the group - and a number of other organisations - have gathered outside AstraZeneca's Cambridge headquarters and sites in Macclesfield and Oxford.
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