There is, unfortunately, no shortage of bad news for women these days. In the U.S., the pandemic’s recession has not relented for us—while we made some progress on unemployment in July, we’d need to see those same gains for the rest of the year to make up for the number of jobs we lost to COVID-19.
Globally, history tells us that the ongoing crises in Haiti and Afghanistan will fall more heavily on women.
And over all of this, the threat of the pandemic remains both in the U.S. with the rise of the Delta variant here, and globally with most of the world potentially waiting years for a vaccine. Inaction will have dire results: We could potentially lose generations of progress made for women and girls globally. We must solve the vaccine equity crisis to have a chance at solving all the rest.
How do we do that? As world leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and global health experts have been calling for, President Joe Biden must put his weight and influence behind America’s support for the World Trade Organization’s IP waiver. It was a huge step for the U.S. to back this waiver, but precious little has happened in the months since.
We in the U.S. must harness our considerable power to push other wealthy governments to back the waiver, while also transferring vaccine recipes and technology to lower-income countries. This would allow countries to produce their own vaccines and rapidly remedy the massive inequity we’re currently seeing in global vaccine access. Currently, 81 percent of vaccine doses have gone to wealthier countries, while less than 3 percent have gone to low-income ones.
Those of us in wealthy countries must demand, organize and fight to end vaccine apartheid and fix the system that got us here. That includes reforming the monopolistic global medicines system, from drug development to distribution, to root out the structural inequities that have led to the vaccine apartheid we are seeing today. I witnessed the horrors of these inequities up close as a young legal aid attorney in India two decades ago.