As a global research-based pharmaceutical company, Merck believes it has an important role and responsibility in improving access to medicines, vaccines and quality health care worldwide. Our role is first and foremost to discover and develop innovative medicines and vaccines that treat and prevent unmet medical needs.

We also have a role to play in helping to ensure our products are accessible and affordable to those in need, and we are working very hard through a number of initiatives and partnerships to achieve this objective.

However the enormity of the challenge is far greater than our ability alone to address it. Barriers to quality care and medical treatment such as lack of trained health care professionals, weak infrastructure, civil strife and dearth of safe drinking water in many parts of the world make even basic health care delivery difficult at best. We believe our role in addressing these far greater challenges is to work in partnership with others – governments, donors, patient organizations, health care professionals, nongovernmental organizations, multilateral organizations and others in the private sector – to lend our expertise and knowledge. We also have an important role in to play through our public policy and outreach efforts to advocate for change that will improve access while balancing our ability to continue to innovate and develop needed products.

Great progress is being made to address these challenges and future technological advances portend even greater opportunities for the world's population and growing economies. However, more progress and more partnership are needed to ensure everyone worldwide has access to the same level of quality medicines, vaccines and health care.

The content on this page was last modified on October 24, 2008.