The global right to health and the reality of the COVID-19 vaccine distribution

Human rights in times of crises #4 The COVID-19 pandemic has, in unprecedented ways, highlighted the importance of the right to health. The pandemic sharpens the focus on social inequalities between the Global North and the Global South, while the discrepancy between the rich and the poor is also palpable here in Germany: how healthy one is, has much to do with access to wealth. In this episode, Meena Jagannath (Movement Law Lab), Achal Prabhala (AccessIBSA), Andreas Wulf (medico international) and Miriam Saage-Maaß (ECCHR) discuss what needs to change for medicines and vaccines to no longer be treated as commodities, but instead as common goods. They engage on what role can the global health rights movement play when up against big pharma’s interests. Human rights in times of crises is ECCHR’s talk series on resistance and concrete utopias. With our talks, we want to create the necessary platform for actors from all over the world to discuss and advance global human rights struggles. Human rights are a concrete utopia worth defending. But how to defend them needs to be constantly reinvented. As we find ourselves in a time of profound global transitions, human rights actors need to refer to prevailing inequalities and the underpinning social questions. ECCHR initiated an event series that is now available as a podcast to rethink the struggle for and around human rights. For more information, go to: ecchr.eu/human-rights-in-times-of-crises Let’s stay in touch! You want to stay up to date on ECCHR’s cases, events and publications? Subscribe to our newsletter.