Target 17.6: Science and technology cooperation
Enhance North-South, South-South and triangular regional and international cooperation on and access to science, technology and innovation and enhance knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms
Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
Why shareholder democracy is helpful
Knowledge sharing on mutually agreed terms depends partly on how patent-holding companies license. The Medicines Patent Pool, established in 2010, had by the end of 2020 supplied 18.55 billion doses through voluntary licenses from 10 patent holders to 23 generic manufacturers. Those licenses reached 148 countries and saved an estimated 1.96 billion dollars. Pharmaceutical, technology and agricultural firms therefore hold a helpful lever, and owners can vote for access-oriented licensing. Most STI cooperation nonetheless flows through public research funding and intergovernmental programs, so owners help at the margin.
How this was scoredHelpful
Helpful. Owners voting their values help. Others must carry most of it.
We have not yet written down the two answers behind this rating. Recording them on every item, so a reader can check the reasoning and not only the conclusion, is work in progress.
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
1 campaign on record
At Moderna and Pfizer, asked the board to commission a third-party report analysing the feasibility of promptly transferring intellectual property and technical know-how so that additional qualified manufacturers in low and middle income countries could produce COVID-19 vaccine doses. At Johnson & Johnson, asked the board to report on whether and how its subsidiary Janssen's receipt of government financial support for developing and manufacturing vaccines and therapeutics affected access to them.
With People's Vaccine Alliance
Result: All three proposals were voted down at meetings held on 28 April 2022. Moderna's Proposal 4 drew 70,878,392 votes for and 227,007,857 against, with 1,518,730 abstentions and 34,671,090 broker non-votes, which is 23.8% of the votes cast for and against. Pfizer's Item 6 drew 1,023,141,083 for and 2,714,524,824 against, or 27.4%. Johnson & Johnson's Item 8 drew 616,715,019 for and 1,207,732,861 against, or 33.8%. Oxfam put the Moderna figure at 24 percent of the nominal vote and 29 percent of the independent vote, once the 17 percent held by the company's directors and senior executives is set aside, and said it was the first time shareholders had voted for a resolution of this kind on any company proxy ballot.
We found no change by any of the three companies that a source we opened attributes to these votes. Johnson & Johnson did not announce vote totals at its meeting and filed them with the Securities and Exchange Commission afterwards. The account of company responses that the earlier version of this row carried, on doses to COVAX and the African Union, the Biovac partnership and nonprofit-basis distribution, rested entirely on a Fierce Pharma article that no longer opens, live or through the Internet Archive, so it is not restated here.
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 UN Sustainable Development Goals's, and we link to their original.
How we score dependency, in full.