Advancing Global Health Equity in the COVID-19 Response: Beyond Solidarity
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SYMPOSIUM: COVID-19
Advancing Global Health Equity in the COVID-19 Response: Beyond Solidarity Stephanie B. Johnson
Received: 11 May 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In the coming weeks and months SARSCoV-2 may ravage countries with weak health systems and populations disproportionately affected by HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and other infectious diseases. Without safeguards and proper attention to global health equity and justice, the effects of this pandemic are likely to exacerbate existing health and socio-economic inequalities. This paper argues that achieving global health equity in the context of COVID-19 will require that notions of reciprocity and relational equity are introduced to the response. Keywords Global health justice . COVID-19 . Ethics
While much of the world’s attention is currently focused on Europe and the United States, experts worry that in the coming weeks and months SARS-CoV-2 may ravage countries with weak health systems and populations disproportionately affected by HIV, tuberculosis (TB), and other infectious diseases (Nordling 2020). At the same time, the Trump administration has been accused of offering a German medical company “large S. B. Johnson (*) Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected] S. B. Johnson Ethox Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
sums of money” for exclusive access to a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine (Oltermann 2020). According to an anonymous source, Trump was aiming to secure a vaccine against the coronavirus for the United States, “but for the US only.” It was also reported that the German government was offering its own financial incentives for the vaccine to stay in the country. This stark example reveals the unfairness and inequities of the global political and health systems. Unfortunately, inequitable distribution of vaccines is not the only way in which global inequities can be reproduced. Without safeguards and proper attention to global health equity and justice, the effects of this pandemic are likely to exacerbate existing health and socio-economic inequalities. Global coordinated efforts in response to COVID-19 led by international organizations such as UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) have attempted to integrate notions of global “solidarity” into practice and policy. In this paper we explore how solidarity is used in this context and how it can be manifest. We argue that achieving global health equity in the context of COVID-19 will also require that other equityorientated perspectives, namely reciprocity and relational equity, must be introduced to the response.
Solidarity In April 2020, the UN General Assembly unanimously adopted a resolution calling for increased global
Bioethical Inquiry
solidarity and international cooperation against the novel coronavirus outbreak. Similarly, in April 2020 the WHO and UNICEF initiated the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. UNICEF (2020) reports that “money collected through the f
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