Following the announcement that BioNTech and Pfizer’s co-developed Covid-19 vaccine candidate is over 90 percent effective,  Morgenbladet, a leading Norwegian weekly, interviewed us about the implications. While celebrating the news, we pointed out that access will be a major challenge for poor countries, and questioned the ethics of the compa...

Decolonisation is not a metaphor and decoloniality is not an end. Rather, it is a means, a segue, a process, a lens with multiple ends. To advance socially just health systems, we argue for global health scholars (and especially us located in postcolonial contexts) to take a political stance on the side of justice. We need to recognise that we h...

It’s been nine months now since the first case of Covid-19 was reported in Kenya. Cases were low in the summer,  but in recent months there has been a steady increase in cases. In November, my country recorded the highest number of cases in a single month (15, 382 till now, with 289 deaths), and just a few weeks ago, Kenya broke its daily reco...

Kent Buse & Anthony Zwi wrote this on behalf of the Reclaiming Comprehensive Public Health Group Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic reflect long-standing tensions in public health between biosecurity- and biomedically-focused approaches and those that address social determinants, facilitate participation and protect human rights. As noted by Lo...

Over these last years, under the leadership of Dr Agnes Soucat, the Health Systems Governance and Financing Department of WHO has been pursuing a multi-pronged strategy for the generation and management of knowledge in its area of work. We embraced the view that health systems are complex – this implies that interventions aiming at improving t...

Last year, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with its tiny 83,600Km2 of land and a little under 10 million residents, ranked 56th out of 195 countries on the (now somewhat controversial) John’s Hopkins Global Health Security index. The country was labeled as  as ‘more prepared’ in the face of disaster – in between ‘least prepared’ and ...

The 73rd World Health Assembly resumes virtually next week at a time when large parts of Europe including Switzerland are locked down. What’s more the Director General of WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is currently in self-quarantine after coming in contact with a COVID-19 confirmed case. It is as somber a milieu that one could be faced with,...

The gaps around the enjoyment of the human right to health in Latin America and other parts of the world are still alarming. Inequity in access to basic services persists, especially for vulnerable groups. In response to these inequities in Latin America and other countries, judicial litigation around the right to health has expanded significant...

In many parts of the world, COVID-19 has caused sudden disruption in essential health services, including for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). A recent WHO report indicated that, due to the pandemic, as many as 75 % of its member states  had experienced acute service interruptions for NCDs. The pandemic has hit hard both ostensibly “strong”...