And over all of this, the threat of the pandemic remains both in the U.S. with the rise of the Delta variant here, and globally with most of the world potentially waiting years for a vaccine. Inaction will have dire results: We could potentially lose generations of progress made for women and girls globally. We must solve the vaccine equity crisis to have a chance at solving all the rest.
How do we do that? As world leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and global health experts have been calling for, President Joe Biden must put his weight and influence behind America’s support for the World Trade Organization’s IP waiver. It was aWe in the U.S. must harness our considerable power to push other wealthy governments to back the waiver, while also transferring vaccine recipes and technology to lower-income countries.
Those of us in wealthy countries must demand, organize and fight to end vaccine apartheid and fix the system that got us here. That includes reforming the monopolistic global medicines system, from drug development to distribution, to root out the structural inequities that have led to the vaccine apartheid we are seeing today. I witnessed the horrors of these inequities up close as a young legal aid attorney in India two decades ago.
One of the first clients I met were a couple and their three young children. As the young kids ran around my office, the parents told me that they both had HIV. The mother had only recently been infected, but knew she must ensure her childrens’ guardianship was transferred in the inevitable case of her death. The worst part of the situation is that the HIV medication to treat both her and her husband existed, but they were unable to afford it.have already lost a parent or caregiver to COVID-19.
Fortunately, there are many working to fight the vaccine apartheid that is exacerbating the suffering that women across the world are enduring from the pandemic. Among those groups is the