This year's ICLQ Annual Lecture will be given by Dr Mark Eccleston-Turner and Dr Michelle Rourke and is based on their article 'Arguments Against the Inequitable Distribution of Vaccines Using the Access and Benefit Sharing Transaction'.
This highly topical article tackles the inequitable distribution of vaccines throughout the world from a global health law perspective. It shines a light on 'Access and Benefit Sharing', a transactional mechanism that allows States to trade access to pathogen samples in exchange for vaccines. The authors persuasively argue that the ABS mechanism undermines the human right to health because it makes that right a commodity to be bought. Rather, they argue, the provision of pathogen samples to the global research commons and the fair and equitable distribution of vaccines should be two parallel public goods to be pursued as goals in and of themselves.