October 2021
The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau
Prime Minister of Canada
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2
Canada
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau,
I am writing to express my deep concern over the failure of high-income countries to protect the right to health on a global level, and to ensure that the COVID-19 pandemic truly ends. It is essential that you take immediate action to expand access to COVID-19 vaccines all around the world.
Canada is legally bound to a number of international human rights treaties that require states to protect the right to health. Although I am thankful for your work to protect Canadians by securing vaccines for our population, I urge you to support other countries in upholding the right to health of their populations. Canada needs to demonstrate leadership in upholding human rights during the pandemic. We should not be holding on to more vaccine doses than we need to inoculate our population, while other countries are not even able to vaccinate their healthcare workers.
Solutions already exist to address the lack of global access to vaccines; Canada should endorse and advance these solutions. Specifically, we call on you to take the following actions:
- Begin immediately to redistribute our excess vaccines to low-income countries, with a clear schedule of deliveries over the next 100 days.
- Fully support the temporary waiver to the WTO TRIPS Agreement, which would ensure that intellectual property rights do not impede global access to COVID-19 health products.
I hope that you will work quickly to accomplish these actions. Removing barriers to production and re-distributing vaccine doses to increase global access is necessary not only to protect the right to health abroad, but also to ensure that Canadians are truly safe from the pandemic. As we have seen from the new COVID-19 variants, no country can put this pandemic behind them until we achieve global herd immunity.
(…Add your thoughts or personal connection to this issue here…)
Thank you very much for your attention to this urgent matter, and for your continued work to protect people from COVID-19.
Sincerely,
(Name)
Member of Grandmothers Advocacy Network
(Your City and Province/Territory)
