From patients lying in the parking lots of hospitals, in the back seats of cars suffocating as their family members searched frantically for oxygen in India during its second wave of COVID last year, to the inability to receive emergency care amidst constant bombing and shelling in current war-torn Ukraine, global health experts and leaders […] Continue reading ->
A Medicines Patent Pool (MPP) announcement Thursday that it has signed agreements with 35 companies to manufacture generic versions of Pfizer’s life-saving COVID-19 Paxlovid treatment for distribution in 95 low- and middle-income countries came fire almost immediately from medicines access groups as too little, too late.  The MPP-brokered sublicences follow on from an agreement between […] Continue reading ->
The World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Director-Genera, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has “warmly welcomed” the breakthrough reached this week over a waiver on intellectual property for the production of COVID-19 vaccines. “This is a major step forward and this compromise is the result of many long and difficult hours of negotiations. But we are not there yet. […] Continue reading ->
Two years after the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic on 11 March 2022, the developed world’s long-time fixation on the SARS-CoV2 virus, which has killed 6 million people, has suddenly shifted away from health to the war in Ukraine and sharply rising geopolitical tensions.  Meanwhile high-income countries have dropped […] Continue reading ->
Amid rising hunger due to COVID-19, conflict and climate change, the African Union (AU) has declared 2022 as the Year of Nutrition. Before 5am, Nigerian fishermen living in Lagos’s floating slum, Makoko, have paddled their wooden boats several kilometers into the main river for fishing activities. Their harvests are largely influenced by how far out […] Continue reading ->
Commercialising the health sector and leaving healthcare up to the markets is “dangerous” and “really amoral” the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the launch of a brief on measuring value in the economy on Tuesday.  The policy brief, produced by the WHO Council on the Economics of Health for All, […] Continue reading ->