Speakers and Presenters
The hopeful promise and roll-out of Covid-19 vaccines comes attached
with a series of difficult questions. Are vaccines a 'human right'? Should
patents be enforced in a way that puts people in the global south behind the
queue of those that live in the United States and Europe? And how much do we
know anyway about the new technologies that went into making it? As the world
struggles to manufacture the vaccine at volume, India and China have the
capacity to scale up production to meet global needs. They did so during the
HIV-AIDS pandemic, when global south governments led by Nelson Mandela fought
big pharma for the right to manufacture and sell essential life-saving drugs.
Can the same strategies be mobilized to deal with inequalities in the
distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine? This talk answers these questions of
vaccine access through the lens of decolonization and offers key takeaways
about what history teaches us about the possibilities and limits of vaccine
equity.
Organizer
Additional Organizers
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; Weatherhead Center for Ianternational Affairs; School of Engineering and Applied Sciences