Pauline Londeix, Medicines for All strategist

To meet us, Pauline Londeix offers a long walk in the park of Villa Borghese, in Rome, where she recently settled. Strolling to the district of Testaccio, this brunette with a deep gaze stops in front of a commemorative plaque marking the former training ground of AS Roma, one of Italy’s most popular football clubs. “My father passed on to me the taste for Italy where he lived for a long time, in particular that of its culture. With him, I played football and I discussed game tactics ”, she explains with passion. His father, the writer Georges Londeix (1932-2011), is the author of a novel entitled Soccer, published in 1972. It is from him that this ardent activist for access to medicines for all inherited her interest in strategies.

In this case, those by which the pharmaceutical industry takes advantage of the patent system, created in the 1990s by the World Trade Organization. At 34, this former Act Up is one of the pioneering figures of a new generation of activists determined to dismantle the system of exclusive rights by methods combining strategic use of expertise and cleverly targeted action. It is from the kitchen of her apartment in Testaccio that she writes the press releases for the Observatory for transparency in drug policies (Otmeds), created in 2019 with Jérôme Martin, met at Act Up, and which she unmasks without respite the flaws in the speeches, especially in those justifying the maintenance of patents on vaccines against Covid-19, to the detriment of the countries of the South.

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“She is part of a new generation of activists who are characterized by a very high level of technicality and who have built international solidarity networks, forming a very effective small international. They are very mobile and very flexible, both in the collective and very independent. Behind Otmeds, there is a whole chain of lawyers and experts on whom they can rely to answer questions as specific as access to raw materials for medicines ”, observes the film producer Hugues Charbonneau, to whom we owe 120 beats per minute, met at Act Up. “Pauline is at the same time very gentle, always in the pedagogy, but she is pugnacious. She knows exactly what she wants and she keeps going “, he adds again.

Concern for equity, equality

“She is a constructive activist who wants to get things done for the sake of fairness and equality”, adds the Nobel Prize for Medicine Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who recommended her as a member of the Ethics Committee of the Institut Pasteur. “His open-mindedness is remarkable, insists the immunologist. It was born out of the fight against HIV / AIDS, but it goes further, with a vision of global health for all, access to medicines for all and on the whole planet. “

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