Irish Examiner View: Ireland’s role in EU vaccine access policy

Thirty-one private consultancies were employed to lobby the European Commission on the pharmaceutical industry’s behalf

Ireland helped form the firmest resistance to radical plans to waive intellectual property rights which would potentially have given poorer countries better access to vaccines.

Ireland is rightly proud of the contribution made by its scientists to the world’s sum of knowledge and the global quest for safety, security, and stability. Just this week Science Foundation Ireland has been hymning the achievements of 5,700 SFI-supported international academic research partnerships traversing 84 countries and a further 1,500 collaborations with industrial enterprises overseas.

That’s a lot of brainpower at work and underlines our nation’s achievements in punching above our weight when funding is being handed out. As SFI’s Ciarán Seoighe notes: “We are in the upper echelons of European countries when it comes to our success rate. One of the things we are seeing now is the mission-oriented approach in Europe. We all have the same problems relating to climate, health, and so on, and this approach will help us to pool our knowledge and research talent to find solutions to them.”