Skip to content
openDemocracy
Subscribe

The West must start treating vaccines as a global public good – before it’s too late

As NGOs, UN agencies and the governments of less affluent states call for the suspension of patents, the stakes could not be higher

By Boaventura de Sousa Santos
The West must start treating vaccines as a global public good – before it’s too late
An image of human antibodies attacking a COVID-19 virus particle
Published:
Share

The consensus is that the current pandemic will be with us for a long time to come. We will enter a period of intermittent outbreaks of COVID-19, whose precise characteristics are yet to be defined. There are no clear rules governing the interplay between our immune system and the mutations of the virus. We will have to live with uncertainty, however dramatic the advances in contemporary biomedical science.

Yet we know a few things for sure.

We know that the recurrence of pandemics is related to the dominant model of development and consumption, and to the associated changes in climate; to the pollution of seas and rivers and to the deforestation of forests.

This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International licence. If you have any queries about republishing please contact us. Please check individual images for licensing details.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0