At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, while people in high-income countries were receiving booster shots, nurses in Africa were still waiting for their first. Moderna, Pfizer, and BioNTech were calling the shots — making $1,000 a second from vaccines that were developed with public money, building on years of work from scientists at public institutions. This vast power imbalance created nine new pharmaceutical billionaires in a matter of months, while many of the world’s poorest died without vaccines.
To the millions of people in the global south, the message was clear: When the chips are down, your lives are not as valued as those in high-income countries.
We saw this coming. We had both lived through the darkest days of the AIDS pandemic. We had seen the lives of relatives, friends, and colleagues taken because pharmaceutical monopolies meant lifesaving HIV/AIDS medicines cost thousands of dollars a month. We fought then, and we won; generic, HIV/AIDS drugs are now available to millions of the poorest people on earth.
About the authors
Winnie Byanyima
Winnie Byanyima is the executive director of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. A grass-roots activist, human rights advocate, and world-recognized expert on women’s rights, she began her career as an engineer in her native Uganda. Appointed to the diplomatic service in 1989, she represented Uganda in France and at UNESCO. She was a member of parliament for 10 years in Uganda, and thereafter served at the African Union Commission. She was UNDP’s director of gender and development between 2006 and 2013.
Max Lawson
Max Lawson is co-chair of the People’s Medicines Alliance and head of inequality policy and advocacy at Oxfam International.
