Protesters have gathered outside AstraZeneca’s headquarters to demand the pharmaceutical firm shares its Covid-19 vaccine technology.

The demonstration, organised by Global Justice Now, is calling for the British-Swedish company to openly licence its jab and commit to sharing the technology with the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Protestors at the headquarters, based in Cambridge, have chained themselves to the doors, while others have scaled the building. 

Protests are also planned at the firm’s Macclesfield site and at the University of Oxford, which worked with AstraZeneca to develop the vaccine.

Read also: Where is the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine made?

Global Justice Now said the action, which coincides with AstraZeneca’s annual general meeting on Tuesday, also seeks to persuade Oxford University to make all of its future medical innovations open-licensed.

CambridgeLive reports that there are around 80 protestors at the headquarters.

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said: “Scientists at Oxford University, a publicly-funded institution, developed this lifesaving vaccine through a research and development process that was 97 per cent publicly funded.

“The resulting vaccine should have been openly accessible to everyone, but AstraZeneca swooped in and privatised it.

“The UK is reaping the benefits of the highly effective vaccines that are now available, but people in low and middle-income countries are still dying daily by the thousands from Covid-19.

“AstraZeneca like to portray themselves as the good guys, but they’ve boycotted attempts to pool the vaccine knowledge they control just like all the other Pharma giants – and now claim they have no time to share this knowledge globally.

Read also: Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine: your most-googled questions answered 

“Today, we’re demanding AstraZeneca pool this publicly created knowledge so the whole world can ramp up production of these vaccines.”

The social justice organisation claimed that AstraZeneca has not yet joined WHO’s Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, which facilitates the sharing of technology for vaccines and treatments.

It comes as the group put up posters at bus stops across the UK over the weekend to highlight the level of public investment in vaccine research and development and the profits made by pharmaceutical companies.

A spokesperson for AstraZeneca said: “We agree with the view that the extraordinary circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures.

“AstraZeneca has risen to the challenge of creating a not-for-profit vaccine that is widely available around the world, and we are proud that our vaccine accounts for 98 per cent of all supplies to COVAX.

“We have established 20 supply lines spread across the globe and we have shared the IP and know-how with dozens of partners in order to make this a reality.

“In fact, our model is similar to what an open IP model could look like.”