Pandemic Accord Is 20% Health Equity and 80% Inequity, Says AHF
May 06 2024 - 10:15PM
Business Wire
With the Pandemic Accord negotiations set to resume tomorrow for
a last-ditch effort to find consensus before the deadline at the
end of May, AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) has described the
current state of the text as 20% equity and 80% inequity.
Specifically, the comment refers to Article 12 of the Accord,
which deals with the World Health Organization (WHO) Pathogen
Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS). It says that in exchange
for sharing pathogen information, developing countries will be
entitled to access 20% of the production of safe, efficacious and
effective pandemic-related health products in a timely manner via
the WHO – 10% as a donation, and 10% at a discounted WHO price.
“According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), there are
currently 152 developing countries where 6.82 billion people live,
or 85.4% of the world's population. Thus, what we can conclude from
the language of Article 12 is that a commitment of 10% for
donations, plus 10% at affordable prices for critical commodities
like vaccines adds up to 20% in support of global health equity,
while the remaining 80% remains beyond the reach of developing
countries, perpetuating inequity,” said Dr. Jorge Saavedra,
Executive Director of the AHF Institute for Global Public Health in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “This should be completely unacceptable
for developing countries. Continuing this imbalance could
potentially lead to severe health crises in these nations which
will eventually and inevitably impact the entire world – a
situation that we cannot afford to ignore in the wake of
COVID-19.”
Another major concern about the latest draft of Article 12 of
the Pandemic Accord, raised by the AHF Global Public Health
Institute, is that the limited benefits offered are tied to a
pandemic declaration, meaning that the public health goods needed
by developing countries for prevention and preparedness will not be
available before a pandemic is declared. In other words, they will
be too little, too late.
“This is perhaps the last chance the world has to address the
systemic inequality in the current global public health order for a
long time – giving in to pressure from corporate interests and
profit motives at this point is beyond foolish. If we fail to
enshrine equity as a fundamental principle of global public health,
all countries will be forced to pay many times over. The
negotiations have been long, difficult, and contentious, but
developed countries must find the wherewithal to do the right
thing,” said AHF President Michael Weinstein.
AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF), the largest global AIDS
organization, currently provides medical care and/or services to
over 1.9 million clients in 47 countries worldwide in the US,
Africa, Latin America/Caribbean, the Asia/Pacific Region and
Europe. To learn more about AHF, please visit our website:
www.aidshealth.org, find us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/aidshealth and follow us on Twitter:
@aidshealthcare and Instagram: @aidshealthcare
The AHF Global Public Health Institute was created as a
joint initiative between the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and the
University of Miami in order to engage in global public health
policy analysis and research to generate objective evidence that
can inform improvements in public health policy at the global,
regional, national and local levels, particularly for infectious
diseases. To learn more about the AHF Global Public Health
Institute, visit https://ahfinstitute.org/.
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U.S. MEDIA CONTACT: Ged Kenslea, Senior Director,
Communications, AHF +1.323.308.1833 work +1.323.791.5526 mobile
gedk@aidshealth.org
Denys Nazarov, Director of Global Policy &
Communications, AHF +1.323.308.1829 denys.nazarov@ahf.org