Wars are devastating societies and collapsing health systems in Sudan, Palestine, Ukraine, Congo and Yemen: hotspots in a world in flames, where dozens of violent conflicts of lower intensity also make healthcare delivery a nightmare.
Millions are dying from humanitarian crisis and thousands of health and care workers are being killed, including in Gaza where they have been targeted, tortured and humiliated by Israeli forces.
The political rise of right-wing parties and movements and the increasing influence of their ideas in the political process has helped consolidate the condemnable trajectory of cuts in public funding of health as well as overseas development aid to underdeveloped countries, which was unleashed in the wake of the last pandemic.
It is not ending there. The withdrawal of the United States of America from the World Health Organization, under a Trump presidency again, is both emblematic and in itself disastrous for the multilateral system that evolved in the ashes of World War II.
Within all these, barely half a decade from the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak, which was a pandemic of historic significance, there is no guarantee that we will not be caught off guard and suffer much the same calamity as we went through a few years ago, if the microbial world waged another existential battle with humankind.
This is not because humankind lacks what it takes to change this reality, even if we must point out that human activities driving the climate crisis contribute significantly to the heightened possibility of pandemics in the (near?) future.
It is because corporations such as big pharma put profit before anything else, including the lives and health of people. And the wealthier countries where these multinational corporations come from stand firmly behind the business interests of these corporations.
That is why the high hopes of people around the world at arriving at a pandemic treaty with “never again” boldly written into its DNA have been dashed. It is still not clear if any international agreement would be reached at the 78th World Health Assembly as the 13th meeting of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body (INB) driving the process of arriving at an international instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response recommendations today in Geneva.
The current conjuncture calls for deep reflection and urgent action. The interconnectedness of health with every part of social life was demonstrated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, with the global lockdown.
Similarly, we need to appreciate the pivotal place of politics and the international economic order for achieving universal access to quality health. We must remember that when Member States of the World Health Organization issued the Alma Atta Declaration for “Health for All in 2000” in 1978, they made it clear that it would be impossible to achieve this objective without changing the international economic order.
They boldly referred to the New International Economic Order which the United Nations had adopted in 1974, at the behest of Third World countries as the economically underdeveloped countries of the global South were called at the time. But what arose and has become increasingly virulent is a neoliberal global economic order with equally increasing illiberal political ethos in recent times.
To change the disastrous global reality that this order has made for the health of people and mother Earth, we must fight to change the system itself, in the spirit of the Alma Atta declaration, for today. The struggle is one we must wage together, trade unions, civil society organizations, community-based movements and all who want a better world, with health for all.
