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.
By Zain Rizvi
By December 2020, the world had astonishingly powerful tools against COVID-19. New mRNA vaccines, underpinned by decades of public investment, had been authorized by global regulators. Yet the promise of the vaccines was unevenly realized: deep fault lines emerged between those who were able to secure vaccines and those left behind, or what South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa called “vaccine apartheid.”
Dose shortages elevated the role of pharmaceutical executives. Fielding calls from heads of state, they decided what vaccine deliveries to prioritize, shaping which countries could protect lives and livelihoods. The answer to one of the most important public health questions of our time — who gets access to vaccines? — was mostly determined neither by political representatives nor scientists, but by corporate executives.
By Tlaleng Mofokeng, Daniel Wainstock, and Renzo Guinto
In recent years, there have been growing calls to “decolonize” the field of global health. Global health traces its roots back to colonial medicine when old empires sought to address tropical diseases which, if not controlled, could be brought by colonizers back home.
Today, many countries in the Global South may have already been liberated from their colonizers, but the colonial behavior of global health continues to manifest in policies, funding, research, and operations.
Unlike the tropical diseases of the past, SARS-CoV-2 has affected rich and poor countries alike, but the tools for putting this pandemic under control — most notably vaccines — remain unevenly distributed across the world. As of October 27, 2021, 63.5% of individuals in high-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one shot of the COVID-19 vaccine. Meanwhile, in low-income countries, only 4.8% of the population has been vaccinated with at least one dose.
By Anna Coates
An international instrument on pandemic preparedness and response opens a much-needed space to highlight the centrality of gender inequality considerations in health emergency responses.
With an eye to inclusive governance, investment in gender expertise, and strengthening existing normative mechanisms and architecture for gender equality at global and national levels, a new intergovernmental instrument offers an opportunity for future health emergency preparedness and responses to meaningfully contribute to gender equality.
By Ellen ‘t Hoen
The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the lack of regulation for the sharing of intellectual property (IP) and technology needed for an effective and equitable response to the crisis.
The Pandemic Treaty (or other legal instrument) scheduled for discussion at the World Health Assembly in the fall of 2021 should focus on establishing the norm that the IP and knowledge needed to develop and produce essential pandemic health technologies become global public goods. It should also ensure predictable and sufficient financing for the development of such public goods.
By Benjamin Mason Meier, Judith Bueno de Mesquita, and Sharifah Sekalala
Rising nationalism has presented obstacles to global solidarity in the COVID-19 pandemic response, undermining the realization of the right to health throughout the world.
These nationalist challenges raise an imperative to understand the evolving role of human rights in global health governance as a foundation to advance extraterritorial human rights obligations under global health law.
This contribution examines these extraterritorial obligations of assistance and cooperation, proposing human rights obligations to support global solidarity through the prospective pandemic treaty.
By Caroline E. Foster
A new pandemic instrument should explicitly embrace the three emerging global regulatory standards of due diligence, due regard, and regulatory coherence.
These standards sit at the interface between national and international law to help functionally align the two in ways that will protect and advance shared and competing interests in an interdependent world.
The standards require nations to exercise their regulatory power in certain ways, including demonstrating (i) due regard for the international legal rights and interests of others, (ii) due diligence in the prevention of harm to other States, and (iii) regulatory coherence between governmental measures and their objectives. These international law standards are already implicit in and given effect by the operation of WHO’s current International Health Regulations (IHR) of 2005.
As we develop new pandemic instruments, their presence should be made increasingly explicit. Giving a stronger profile to the standards will help generate new political impetus and new legal bases for implementation of world health law, and fit it to 21st century application.
By Lawrence O. Gostin
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed marked limitations in the International Health Regulations (IHR) and constrained authorities of the World Health Organization (WHO). With a rising imperative to advance pandemic preparedness and response, more than twenty heads of government proposed a new pandemic treaty. This prospective pandemic treaty offers a pathway to develop innovative international legal obligations, strengthening core capacities, good governance, and compliance mechanisms to prepare for novel outbreaks with pandemic potential.
By Tsung-Ling Lee
Despite the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recent efforts to broaden participation, the international infectious disease control regime remains state-centric.
As such, the state-centric infectious disease regime violates the fundamental principle of how contagious diseases spread within and across countries — the virus recognizes no national borders, nor does the virus discriminate. The longstanding global health mantra — no country is safe until all countries are safe; no one is safe until everyone is safe — should guide global pandemic preparedness.
By Brook K. Baker
It was apparent from the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic that a business-as-usual approach — perpetuating the biopharmaceutical industry’s intellectual property-based monopolies and allowing artificial supply scarcity and nationalistic hoarding by rich countries — would result in systemic failure and gross inequity.
The world had seen it all before, from the Big Pharma blockade of affordable antiretrovirals to treat HIV/AIDS, to the hoarding of vaccines by the global north during the H1N1 bird flu outbreak in 2009 and its stockpiling of Tamiflu.
Activists in the access-to-medicines movement quickly mobilized to combat the threat of vaccine/therapeutic apartheid.