Vaccine Equality Campaign
“The pandemic is a portal. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
— Arundhati Roy, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, essayist and political activist
“Covid-19 is a wake-up call – and we are oversleeping.”
— UN Secretary-General General António Guterres
COVID-19 turned the world upside down. But it was hardly the first crisis to affect the billions of people whose rights to health, security, food and a life of dignity are routinely denied on a daily basis.
The pandemic was an Inequality Virus that has highlighted the disparities that are all around us: from unequal access to the vaccine to the fact that frontline workers — who face the greatest health risks — are predominantly women of colour as well as individuals from communities that face discrimination based on their work and descent. The education of an entire generation has been jeopardised, but students from affluent communities with good internet connection fared better than others, while tens of millions of girls are danger of never returning to school. The world’s richest billionaires saw their wealth skyrocket during the pandemic years, while low-paid and informal-economy workers endured shrinking wages and job loss.
While the pandemic is over, the world must still address the inequities and fault lines that were laid bare.
3 Steps to Sustainable Vaccine Equality
Share the Knowledge & Technology
Invest in Public Health
Leave No One Behind
“The pandemic has been like an X-ray showing up the horrific, systemic, institutionalised fault-lines of our egregiously unjust world,” writes Roy.
Read more about the campaign for a People’s Vaccine as well as efforts in other countries across Asia to highlight the Faces of Inequality.