Article 27: Right to share in cultural life and in scientific advancement and its benefits; protection of authors' moral and material interests
Pivotal
Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Why shareholder democracy is pivotal
Access to the benefits of medical science runs through a small number of drug and vaccine makers who decide what to patent, license and charge. Oxfam America's 2022 shareholder proposals asking Moderna and Pfizer to study sharing their mRNA vaccine technology with poorer countries won 24 and 27 percent support, the first time shareholders had ever voted for a resolution like it, though both companies declined to change course afterward. Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility members, led by United Church Funds, have pressed AbbVie for years on whether drug-pricing risk factors into executive pay, drawing 21 percent support in 2018. Separately, the pharmaceutical industry hired about 400 lobbyists, working through 545 lobbyist-client relationships. Companies including Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, Bayer and Gilead each gave roughly a million dollars to the 2025 presidential inauguration fund. They did so while fighting bills preserving billions of dollars in drug-pricing protections. Independent watchdogs treat that scale of political spending as central to why access remains hard to change.
How this was scoredPivotal
Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
Patent, licensing and pricing decisions by drug and vaccine makers directly determine who can afford the benefits of scientific advances, though government procurement, foreign aid, generic-manufacturing capacity and trade rules also shape who ultimately gets access.
Pharmaceutical trade groups deployed more than 500 lobbyist relationships and tens of millions of dollars against Medicare drug-price negotiation and related bills, spending independent reporting identifies as a central reason prices and access remain hard to change.
2 and 2, higher of the two, gives Pivotal
Every rating is the higher of two answers, one for what companies do and one for what they spend to stop the outcome, because the same vote reaches both. See the full method.
Sources
- Gilead Sciences, Inc. Shareholders Decimate Plan To Tie CEO Compensation To Drug Access, BioSpace, 2014-05
- 21% of AbbVie Shareholders Favor Report on How Drug Pricing Risks are Integrated Into Exec Incentive Programs, United Church Funds, 2018-05
- Significant number of Moderna and Pfizer shareholders support vaccine technology transfer, Oxfam International, 2022-04
- AHF: Moderna shareholder resolution on vaccine tech sharing gets 24% vote, AIDS Healthcare Foundation, 2022-04
- Hundreds of Lobbyists Hired to Undermine Drug Price Negotiations, Public Citizen, 2025
What civil society organizations are helping owners on this
Filed the 2022 vaccine-technology-transfer resolutions at Moderna and Pfizer, part of a broader campaign with the People's Vaccine Alliance urging J&J, Pfizer and Moderna investors to focus on vaccine equity.
Led the ICCR-coordinated 2018 AbbVie proposal asking the compensation committee to report annually on how drug-pricing risk factors into executive incentive pay.
Coordinates faith-based and other institutional investors filing recurring access-to-medicines and drug-pricing proposals at Pfizer, AbbVie, Johnson & Johnson and other pharmaceutical companies.
4 campaigns on record
Study the feasibility of transferring vaccine technology and know-how to ramp up production and improve sustainable access to its COVID-19 vaccine worldwide.
Result: 27% support, which Oxfam called the first time shareholders had ever voted for a resolution like it on any company's ballot.
we found no documented change to Pfizer's technology-transfer policy following the vote
Study the feasibility of sharing Moderna's mRNA COVID-19 vaccine technology and know-how with resource-poor countries to expand global manufacturing and access.
With Domini Impact Equity Fund
Result: 24% of the nominal vote (29% of the independent vote, excluding director-held shares);
we found no documented change to Moderna's technology-sharing policy following the vote
Have the compensation committee report annually on the extent to which risks from public concern over drug pricing strategies are integrated into AbbVie's incentive compensation policies, plans and programmes for senior executives, including whether those arrangements reward or fail to penalise executives for pricing strategies that ignore public concern, and whether drug pricing risk is weighed when capital is allocated.
With Members of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, Northwest Coalition for Responsible Investment
Result: Not approved at the 4 May 2018 annual meeting: 247,879,964 for, 887,590,325 against, 14,559,605 abstaining and 260,703,800 broker non-votes, which is 21.8 percent of the votes cast for and against. It was a first-time proposal, it survived AbbVie's attempt at the SEC to have it omitted from the proxy, and the proxy adviser ISS recommended a vote for it.
We found no change to AbbVie's executive pay structure documented in the pages we opened. The campaign continued instead: the same coalition returned to AbbVie in the 2020 season with a resolution asking the company to assess the feasibility of building drug-pricing risk into senior executive compensation, and that one was also voted down.
Adopt a policy that incentive compensation for the chief executive officer include non-financial measures based on patient access to Gilead's medicines, reducing that compensation where funding cuts, restrictions or formulary placement stop eligible patients obtaining prescribed medicines.
Result: Not approved at the 7 May 2014 annual meeting as Proposal 7: 26,726,195 for, 1,048,057,432 against, 157,155,528 abstaining and 115,351,928 broker non-votes, which is 2.5 percent of the votes cast for and against.
Gilead's board answered that patient access was already one of many non-financial goals in its executive compensation programme and that the compensation committee needed flexibility to set objectives each year, and we found no change to Gilead's executive compensation structure documented in the pages we opened.
Gilead Sciences, Inc. Shareholders Decimate Plan To Tie CEO Compensation To Drug Access, BioSpace
Related subjects on other maps
How this rating was made
Every item on every one of our maps is read against one question: how far does this depend on the people who own companies voting their values? We answer it twice, once for what companies do and once for what they spend to stop the outcome, and take whichever answer is higher, since the same vote reaches both. The score carries its reasoning and its sources so that a reader can check it rather than take it.
- Pivotal. Owners voting their values can deliver most of the outcome.
- Necessary. Owners remove an obstacle nothing else removes, and others must also act.
- Helpful. Owners voting their values help, and others carry most of it.
- Independent. This moves without owners. Other levers carry it.
The advocacy record on this page holds only what a source we opened says happened. Where we searched and found nothing, the page says so rather than leaving a silence. Where a campaign names a filer the source does not name, it says that too. Ratings are ours; the list of subjects is Universal Declaration of Human Rights's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.