After three years of its “Zero COVID” policy, the Chinese government allowed a return to relative normalcy for its citizens in early December 2022. Due to the ongoing transmission of Omicron and its numerous COVID subvariants in China, the sudden policy shift was accompanied by rapid community transmission across the country and high numbers of severe COVID cases.

The struggle for fair access to medicines has been struck a terrible blow following the adoption by the World Trade Organization (WTO) last week of an inadequate text rather than the originally proposed “TRIPS Waiver” on COVID monopolies, championed by MSF, civil society and over 100 countries. 

Climate change has been described as the biggest threat to global health in the 21st century. Last year’s UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, COP26, saw large-scale mobilisation in the UK across a wide range of civil society and led to the creation of the COP26 coalition. This coalition included environment and development NGOs, trade unions, grassroots community campaigns, faith groups, youth groups, migrant and racial justice networks — to name a few. The unifying ambition has been to highlight the intersectionality of climate justice and how this issue shows the need for systemic change in our current political and economic systems.

This week, one and a half years after India and South Africa first proposed a landmark intellectual property (IP) waiver for COVID medical tools at the World Trade Organization (WTO), a draft text that had been under discussion by several governments and was leaked in March, has now been officially tabled at the WTO.  

With the news that a leaked draft text on the COVID-19 TRIPS Waiver has now been formally tabled by the Director-General of the World Trade Organization, we explain why this flawed proposal will not deliver what’s needed to save lives during this pandemic and beyond. This blog first appeared in Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Today at its annual shareholders meeting, Moderna will report billions in profits during the ongoing COVID pandemic. The company has already made US$17.7 billion from vaccine sales in 2021. Despite $10 billion in public taxpayer money that went into Moderna’s development and delivery of the COVID vaccine, Moderna refuses to share the mRNA technology behind the vaccine with the rest of the world.