A group of protesters gathered outside the AstraZeneca site in Macclesfield to demand the company shares its Covid vaccine technology.
Campaign group Global Justice Now organised the demonstrations today (Tuesday), which took place at the firm's headquarters in Cambridge, its Macclesfield site and at the University of Oxford.
They are calling on the company to make its Covid-19 vaccine 'openly accessible to everyone', especially to allow low and middle-income nations to ramp up production.
The group's director, Nick Dearden, told CheshireLive: "Scientists at Oxford University, a publicly-funded institution, developed this life saving vaccine through a research and development process that was 97 per cent publicly funded.
"The resulting vaccine should have been openly accessible to everyone.
"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."
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.”
