Much attention has been given recently to the role of pharmaceutical companies in ensuring the realization of health as a universal human right.

In large part, this has been due to two recent communications, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).

Governments, in their role of protecting human rights, have the primary responsibility for managing a health system that ensures the health of their citizens, a role that is implied in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, pharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders also have roles and responsibilities in respecting and promoting the right of all people to standards of living sufficient for ensuring health and well-being.

The role of the pharmaceutical industry in respecting and promoting health as a human right is a complex and controversial one. We believe that, at a basic level, we play an important role in supporting this right through our core activity of discovering, developing and delivering medicines and vaccines to address unmet medical needs. We also recognize our ethical duty to support governments in their efforts to protect the right to health by "doing no harm." We do this in a number of ways as described on this website, including by:

• Monitoring and reporting on the safety of our products
• Providing healthcare workers and consumers with important information on the benefits and side effects of our products
• Safeguarding the health, safety and privacy of patients involved in our clinical trials

During 2010, Merck continued to work with the Danish Institute for Human Rights and a number of other pharmaceutical companies to develop a sector-specific human rights risk-assessment tool that defines our health-related human rights obligations. Merck intends to conduct a human rights self-assessment to determine our strengths and weaknesses in fulfilling these obligations by the end of 2011.

Beyond these efforts, we also have the ability—and we believe the responsibility—to support the right to health and effect positive change. We do this through policies and actions to promote timely product registration, improved access to new medicines and vaccines, and through partnerships and public policy advocacy positions that seek to strengthen healthcare capacity and address deep-rooted and multifaceted barriers to access in ways that are aligned with our business mission and core capabilities.

Others have roles and responsibilities too. Industrialized countries, where most research in life sciences takes place, must continue to foster innovation by funding basic research and supporting related institutions, and by recognizing the value of innovative medicines and vaccines. Developing countries must continue to make healthcare a budget priority, remove taxes and import duties on medicines that unnecessarily raise the price of medications, and seek to limit product diversion to richer countries by price arbitragers. Emerging or middle-income countries should do the same, and also recognize that they can and should pay more for medicines than the poorest countries, rather than take actions that remove incentives for innovation.