Why Now?

Over just the last six months, Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) has helped create an incredible wave of momentum:

• The launch of UAEM’s Statement of Principles (called the Philadelphia Consensus Statement) garnered the support of more than 100 luminaries – including Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Farmer, four Nobel Laureates, top intellectual property professors, and the former deans of the schools of public health at Yale and Harvard – as well as thousands of other students and professors at over a hundred campuses around the world.
• Nature, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the British Medical Journal, and the Financial Times have all covered UAEM’s activities, as have numerous other campus, online, and local publications.
• Working closely with UAEM, U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (VT) introduced legislation that would mandate humanitarian licensing terms modeled on the terms UAEM has urged universities to adopt voluntarily.

In March, on the heels of this publicity, eleven prominent universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges came together for the first time to publicly recognize their fundamental responsibility to ensure the fruits of university research benefit the world’s poor and to commit to the simple principle at the heart of our policy proposals. Their statements demonstrate just how far we’ve come.

But our work is far from over. Even as this language was being drafted, signatory universities continued to license drug candidates with no provisions for access. Principles are not enough. And delay has a real human cost.