macro normal female mosquito isolated on green leaf.

Climate Change and Neglected Tropical Diseases: Key Takeaways from the WHO-WIPO-WTO Trilateral Symposium

By Aparajita Lath*

The World Health Organization (WHO), in collaboration with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), hosted the 10th Trilateral Symposium on Human Health and Climate Change in Geneva this November. This article reflects the significant effort made to put climate-sensitive diseases, many of which are neglected tropical diseases (NTDs), at the forefront of these talks.

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see saw with earth as fulcrum and a pile of vaccines weighing down one side with nothing on the other side.

The Case for Procurement Transparency

By Tara Davis and Nicola Soekoe

In January 2021, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) observed that the world was on the brink of a “catastrophic moral failure” if wealthier nations did not ensure the equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Global health activists and civil society organizations who worked transnationally to curtail what came to be referred to as “vaccine apartheid” faced a pharmaceutical industry that globally relied on secrecy, capital-friendly trade laws, and brute economic force to shirk considerations of human rights. In many ways, pharmaceutical companies and the states that protected them, including by failing to achieve consensus at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for a waiver of intellectual property rights with respect to vaccines, seemed impenetrable.

Unsurprisingly, given the extreme position of power from which pharmaceutical companies were negotiating contracts, there were widespread reports and allegations of inequitable contractual terms and a culture of bullying in the development of contracts. This was an issue of global concern for a long period during the pandemic. In South Africa, the Health Justice Initiative (HJI), a local advocacy organization, joined the global calls for greater procurement transparency.

However, when the South African Department of Health refused to disclose even the names of the entities with which it had entered into vaccine-related agreements, the HJI was forced to turn to the courts for relief.

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Person filling syringe from vial.

Public Health Emergencies and Human Rights Principles: A Solidarity Approach

By Anne Kjersti Befring and Cecilia Marcela Bailliet

  1. Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a grave threat to humanity and revealed the need for a new approach to improve transnational cooperation within the global health system and new perspectives on solidarity addressing the cross-border spread of infection and distribution of vaccines.

The Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (“the Principles”), developed by the Global Health Law Consortium and the International Commission of Jurists, set forth a human rights-based solidarity approach that can provide a basis for implementing the obligations of States and responsibilities of Non-State actors to achieve the goal of limiting the harmful effects of serious health crises.

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scales on blue background.

Judging in the Pandemic – A Malawian Perspective

By Zione Ntaba

Malawi is not a stranger to public health crises in the last number of years, having faced a severe HIV epidemic and several cholera outbreaks continuing into 2023. Nevertheless, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused a major panic in the country’s legal system and judiciary. COVID-19 brought to fruition a major ethical dilemma in ensuring the justice system’s continued functioning, while also protecting the lives of all those involved, and simultaneously ensuring the promotion and protection of human rights.

The constitutional mandate of ensuring access to justice in Malawi, a country which already struggles with effective and efficient justice delivery at the best of times, required urgent resolution, especially noting the potential of human rights violations arising from State responses to COVID-19 worldwide. Interestingly, in addition to the general need to safeguard the justice system as a whole, the pandemic itself brought before the courts issues relating to public health and human rights.

The prevailing principle in Malawi, as it is internationally, is for the judicial system to ensure that there exists an equal balance between the protection and promotion of human rights and the fair and just administration of justice. The courts in Malawi were called upon to rise above the political bureaucracy, to ensure judicial impartiality when dealing with pandemic-related issues. This was crucial in a context in which political responses to the pandemic sometimes remained unquestioned or unchallenged. However, unless these principles — of human rights and fair administration of justice — were properly upheld by the courts, sadly they may have remained in the world of the metaphysical.

It is with this context in mind that I turn to reflecting on the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (“Principles”).

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Bill of Health - Gavel on mask during pandemic, class action lawsuits during pandemic

Old Dogs and New Tricks: A Case for the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights & Public Health Emergencies

By Nerima Were and Allan Maleche

Taking into account our experiences as human rights lawyers working in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic, in this article we briefly analyze the Principles and Guidelines on Human Rights and Public Health Emergencies (the Principles) and make a case for their utility in guiding State measures to prepare for, prevent, and respond to future pandemics consistently with international human rights law and standards.

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Hundred dollar bills rolled up in a pill bottle

Reasonable Pricing Clauses: A First Step Toward Ensuring Taxpayers a Fair Return on their Public R&D Investment

By Nikhil Chaudhry and Reshma Ramachandran

Earlier this month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had successfully included a reasonable pricing provision in a $326M investment contract with Regeneron for development of a next generation monoclonal antibody therapy for COVID-19. This was the first time the Biden Administration had included such a provision as part of its research funding agreements with the private sector, demonstrating that it is indeed possible for the federal government to negotiate deals with pharmaceutical companies that ensure that products developed with public dollars are priced comparably to the global market.

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View of runners crossing Verrazano Bridge at the start of NY City Marathon

What the New York City Marathon Can Teach Us About Equitable Access to Vaccines

By Ana Santos Rutschman

What can the New York City Marathon experience teach those reflecting on ways to increase equity in the transnational allocation of scarce vaccine doses?

Quite a lot, it turns out. I explore this analogy in a recently published article in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics (JLME), Increasing Equity in the Transnational Allocation of Vaccines Against Emerging Pathogens: A Multi-Modal Approach.

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Vaccine and syringe in front of EU flag.

The European Commission’s New Compulsory Licensing Proposal: A Step Forward?

By Sarah Gabriele

On April 27, 2023, the European Commission proposed new legislation that would allow companies to make drugs without the patent holder’s consent in emergency situations. The proposed legislation constitutes a step forward in the European Union’s effort to harmonize patent law in the Union, after the establishment of Unitary Patents and the European Patent Court.

In its proposal, the EU Commission acknowledges that intellectual property rights, and, in particular, patent rights play an important role in access to medicine, especially during public health crises. The COVID-19 crisis demonstrated how the need for protecting and incentivizing innovation clashed with the need to make products widely available. To solve this tension, the Commission recognizes that patent law already offers a solution: compulsory licensing.

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Anonymous crowd of people walking on a busy New York City street.

‘We Want Them Infected’: An Excerpt from Jonathan Howard’s New Book on the COVID-19 Pandemic

This excerpt from the new book titled “We Want Them Infected” is printed with permission from Jonathan Howard, MD and Redhawk Publications.  

By Jonathan Howard

On June 29, 2021, Dr. Harriet Hall penned an essay on the website Science Based Medicine titled “A New COVID-19 Myth?” in which she wrote:

A correspondent suggested I should have known that the pandemic was over months ago. That’s obviously a myth. But where did that idea come from?1

I knew the answer. Even before the first wave peaked, doctors suggested the worst was over and that measures to control the virus were more dangerous than the virus itself. This message was repeated regularly throughout the pandemic.

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