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Three-year Anniversary of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Kyle Knight, Senior Health and Human Rights Researcher: The pandemic has been disastrous for human rights, but I think worst of all has been seeing institutions disappear and, in a way, give up.

It is an enormous challenge to be entering the third year of an era-defining pandemic and see many health officials shrug their shoulders at this: US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. .has basically given up any sense of equal protection.

But the pandemic is also fundamentally changing how the world works, even as authorities pretend to ignore it. It could not be otherwise. For example, the response of the richest country in human history (the United States) to the coronavirus was so negligent that there were more than a million deaths despite the fact that the government had almost incomparable resources at its disposal. These kinds of things invert the way of thinking in the “developed/developing world” and challenge us to rigorously analyze how governance is carried out.

We must also look at the first three years of the Covid-19 pandemic and realize that the most important global policy debate in this regard (that relating to the intellectual property of vaccines, tests and treatments) took place within a body of trade, the World Trade Organization (WTO), which has no mandate on health or human rights issues.

These are just two examples that raise important questions about whether the current dominance of market and capitalist systems is adequate when it comes to defending the right to health. Can we really look at the current system of drug patents, which primarily protects the interests of the private sector, and then see a map of dismal vaccine coverage in low-resource countries, and still think that things are just right? working?

The conclusion is that the pandemic has not ended, and that the authorities affirm the contrary does not imply that this is the case. The burden of infections, diseases and deaths is shifting along predictable lines in marginalized and vulnerable communities. This is not a surprise, but something totally avoidable; to tell the truth, part of the human rights obligations of governments is to work so that this does not happen. One of the main questions is whether the WHO will extend the pandemic stage or declare the emergency over, and what that will mean for the future of the coronavirus, global health, trust in institutions and the protection of fundamental rights.

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