Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation

EVENT: Discussing pharmaceutical human rights accountability during Covid-19
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An International Expert Panel Discussion on Good Covid-19 Company Practices (GCCP)

The Pharmaceutical Accountability Foundation is organising an event on its Good Covid-19 Company Practices (GCCP) project on september 30th 2021, 15:00-16:30 CET.

The event will be an introduction to the GCCP and what we have learned so far on how it can contribute to promoting the human right to health and access to medicines worldwide. We hope that the expert panel discussion will give us insight on what our next steps can be in making use of the GCCP Scorecard.

Please register for the event using this form.

Event programme

  • Opening of the event and introduction on PAF – by Tegan Insoll, PAF board
  • Introduction into the topic of human health rights & access to medicines – by Katrina Perehudoff, PAF Advisory Board and GCCP initiator
  • Presentation of GCCP & goals for the project – by Rosalind Turkie, PAF GCCP researcher
  • Expert panel discussion with prepared & audience questions – moderated by Sabina Voogd, PAF board member

Expert panel

We are proud to announce our expert panelists are Luis Villaroel Villaron, Katrina Perehudoff, Hans Hogerzeil, Kirsten Myhr and Winne van Woerden:

Luis Villarroel Villaron (LLM) is the founder and director of NGO Innovarte which is dedicated on developing public policies in the field of intellectual property (IP) and public interest. Innovarte is currently leading a project on voluntary incentives for IP holders of covid technologies to contribute to C-TAP. He is a former Judge at the Industrial Property Court of Chile and in the past has advocated for the adoption of compulsory licensing of Hepatitis C Drugs in Chile.

He advised several countries in legal reforms of intellectual property and in negotiations of Free Trade Agreements since the Chile FTA with USA. He has extensive experience in multilateral and regional IP negotiations and represented Ecuador in the negotiation of the WIPO Marrakesh Treaty. He has also held academic positions at Chilean Universities and at the Chilean Judicial Academy and has worked as a consultant for UNESCO, among other international organizations.

Katrina Perehudoff (PhD) is a pharmaceutical policy expert, health scientist and legal scholar. Her research is focused on the development, formulation, implementation and evaluation of law and policy interventions in the field of pharmaceuticals and public health.

She is a member of Advisory Board of PAF and HAI and brains behind GCCP scorecard together with Wilbert Banneberg, the chair of our foundation.

Hans Hogerzeil (MD, PhD) is a global expert on essential medicines, medicine policies and health systems in low- and middle income countries. He retired as WHO Director for Essential Medicines in May 2011. He is a founding member of the Global Health Law Groningen Research Centre (2015), which operates at the interface of international law and public health and he was Professor of Global Health there until 2019. Hans’ work is especially relevant to GCCP because he is a member of the Advisory Board of the Access to Medicine Foundation, which publishes the Access to Medicine Index. 

Kirsten Myhr (MScPharm, MPH) is a Norwegian pharmacist, specialized in hospital pharmacy and Master in Public Health. She has 20 years of experience heading university hospitals’ pharmacy departments with pharmacovigilance at the Norwegian regulatory authority and with medicine use in the Norwegian Board of Health.

She has worked at UNICEF and WHO, taught good-pharmacy-practice in Albania and Mongolia and has taken numerous consultancies in Eastern Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa. She has been engaged early on in the WHO/HAI project on developing medicine prices measurement methodologies. She was the alternate representative for healthcare professionals in the European Medicine Agency’s committee for pharmacovigilance and risk management (PRAC) until 2019 and is now a member of HAI Board Europe.

Winne van Woerden has a background in Global Health sciences. She has experience working as a policy advocate, communicator and campaginer on issues of health equity and social justice with several  civil society networks, including UAEM, Wemos and Commons Network. She was part of the National Board of UAEM-NL in 2019-2020, during which she was involved with several advocacy projects and public campaigns on access to health technologies worldwide. She is currently obtaining a second masters in Political Ecology & Degrowth Economics from the University of Barcelona. 

Good Covid-19 Company Practices

The GCCP are a set of 18 good practices, in the form of a scorecard, that pharmaceutical developers/manufacturers of Covid-19 vaccines & therapeutics should undertake to align their actions with human rights principles and international standards for equitable access to medicines.

Image of the GCCP Scorecard
Screenshot of the GCCP Scorecard, as published on our GCCP page.

The GCCP scorecard will illustrate how selected companies are performing on these 18 good practices. Each company can receive a green, yellow, or red score on those practices that can be judged based on information in the public domain or provided by the company. The 18 practices are based on human rights principles and international standards. The 4 main categories are (A) Commitments and accountability; (T) Transparency; (C) International Cooperation; (E) Equality, Non-Discrimination & Equity.

The legal basis to the GCCP is the right to the highest attainable standard of health contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as The United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Human Rights Guidelines for Pharmaceutical Companies in relation to Access to Medicines (2008).

More information on the project can be found on our GCCP page: https://farmaterverantwoording.nl/en/covid-19-practices/.

Event details

The event will be hosted through Zoom. Registered attendees will receive the link in the week before the event. Click here for Zoom video tutorials. The event will be recorded for future reference. We will notify the attendees at the start of the event.

The event is on invitational base. Invitation requests and other questions about the event can be directed to Emily Dowdalls, PAF project coordinator through projectcoordinator@farmaterverantwoording.nl.

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