On Thursday, WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned the world is playing with fire in its handling of the pandemic.
TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: Coupled with low investment in early diagnosis, it’s simply not acceptable that in the worst pandemic in a century innovative treatments that can save lives are not reaching those that need them. We are playing with a fire that continues to burn us. Meanwhile, manufacturers are posting record profits. WHO supports fair reward for innovation, but we cannot accept prices that make lifesaving treatments available to the rich and out of reach for the poor. This is a moral failing.
You know, what the director-general is saying is absolutely correct. And as somebody who’s worked in global health for now over a decade, I’ve seen that this was the weakness that we were all worried about, you know, particularly that if we were hit with a pandemic like this, that countries would turn inwards instead of working together, that access to lifesaving medications and vaccines would primarily be focused in high-income countries and that the idea of global health equity, the idea that all lives matter regardless of where you live, that those ideas would take really a backseat to the interests of wealthy countries. And we saw this play out even with the Ebola epidemics, right? So, we saw with Ebola in West Africa, once it started to spread and there was a threat of cases coming to Europe or the United States, that’s when there was a lot more investment and interest and attention. And so, when there was a subsequent outbreak in the DRC, there was a lot more focus on it at that point than there had been, even though the DRC had suffered many Ebola outbreaks.
You know, we have seen in global health, especially around pandemics, that the focus is on global health security: How do rich nations keep cases from coming in? And this is what
— source democracynow.org | May 06, 2022
