As we head into the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) teams around the world bring with them many lessons learned about how to confront this coronavirus in particular as well as decades of expertise from dealing with other infectious diseases.
Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic two years ago, we’ve adapted our medical activities in sync with new waves of the virus and have integrated COVID-19 care into most of our projects. We’ve responded to COVID-19 and adapted our projects to the threats posed by this new disease in more than 70 countries—from Yemen to Peru to Democratic Republic of Congo. We’ve worked independently and with local Ministries of Health to prevent transmission of the virus through vaccination and the implementation of infection prevention and control measures and provided the best care possible to people who’ve contracted it.
“Our teams have been able to adapt incredibly well to the pandemic and maintain our medical service delivery,” said Dr. Elena Nicco, an infectious disease doctor and medical coordinator of MSF's COVID-19 task force based in Brussels, during a recent MSF-USA webcast. This includes in war zones in Yemen, where engaging with communities to address people’s most pressing health needs and educating them about COVID-19 has been especially difficult given the chronic conflict and limited medical supplies and staff.
But our work is far from over. Despite people’s desire to move on from the emergency phase of the pandemic, COVID-19 is still a global crisis.
“It looks like COVID-19 will become endemic to the planet,” said Dr. Northan Hurtado, head of MSF’s medical unit based in New York. “Endemic doesn't mean that it's good. Endemic doesn't mean that it’s harmless. We have endemic diseases in certain areas of the planet, like measles, and measles still kills a lot of people every year. We have to continue fighting, decrease transmission, decrease mortality and morbidity, decrease the consequences of the disease, and protect, most importantly, vulnerable populations. We can’t leave anyone behind.”
Scientific breakthroughs like COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics have paved the way back to a sense of normalcy in wealthier countries like the US. Meanwhile, people in low- and middle-income countries that couldn’t afford to outbid high-income countries on the first rounds of lifesaving medical tools are still unnecessarily left without protection against the disease. Currently, fewer than 14 percent of people in low-income countries have received even one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and most of the existing oral COVID-19 pills that are easy to administer in low-resources settings, like those in which MSF works, have already been purchased by wealthy countries.
“It's really miraculous that we were able to see the scientific advancements we needed to have vaccines for this illness generated in less than a year after the pandemic was declared,” said Mihir Mankad, MSF-USA's senior advisor for global health advocacy and policy. “But what we have failed at doing, and we continue to fail at doing, is to ensure that these tools are equitably available across the world.”
There is no reason more vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics can’t be made so more people have access. There are hundreds of global vaccine- and drug-makers that stand ready to help boost supplies of COVID-19 medical tools—if only pharmaceutical corporations would stop blocking them from doing so. One way for governments of countries like the US to demand companies stop standing in the way of this additional production is by adopting the TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization. This waiver would suspend intellectual property restrictions on all COVID-19 health products for the duration of the pandemic and help enable manufacturers in low-and-middle-income countries to produce COVID-19 medical tools.
"The global supply of COVID-19 products has been constrained due to the interest of the few pharmaceutical companies that control production of these vaccines," Mankad said. "If they were willing to share their technology with other vaccine manufacturers in other countries, we wouldn't have this question about artificially constrained supply. We would've been able to be producing these vaccines in other parts of the world and rapidly deploying them into the environments in which they were needed."
While everyone may feel ready to move on from COVID-19, not everyone has the luxury. As we head into a third year of the pandemic, there is still much to be done to treat and prevent COVID-19—from continuing to educate the public and combat stigma and vaccine hesitancy, to ensuring actors like MSF have the logistical support for vaccination campaigns in hard-to-reach communities. Governments in countries like the US and pharmaceutical corporations must also commit to expanding global access to lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines, treatments, and diagnostics–and making sure our teams on the ground have the tools they need to prevent and treat the disease. We can’t leave anyone behind.
