Rasna Warah is a Kenyan writer and journalist who is working with the ONE Campaign’s COVID-19 Aftershocks project.
African governments have been urging rich countries to make COVID-19 vaccines more accessible to their citizens. But some countries on the continent are either returning the vaccines or destroying them, a scenario that indicates significant weaknesses in both the supply and demand side of mass vaccination programmes. Vaccines are going to waste in some African countries because there isn’t sufficient uptake; in...
AfterShocks: Health
Over 1.4 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered worldwide. This is an impressive feat less than 15 months since the start of the pandemic — but we’re still a long way from reaching everyone, everywhere. Countries in North America and Europe have raced ahead, with national coverage as high as 40-50% of the population in some countries. But other parts of the world are struggling to protect even their most vulnerable citizens and frontline health workers.
At the start...
Having safe and effective vaccines to fight COVID-19 within a year of the first reported cases is a historic scientific achievement. But as our animated series “Pandemica” has illustrated, unless the world prioritizes fair and equal vaccine distribution, we’re at risk of prolonging the pandemic. What happens in the next six weeks will determine the trajectory of this pandemic for the next six months. This is a critical point in the pandemic, as world leaders can either turn the...
In 2020, global health has gone from a fringe issue to the forefront of people’s mind, all thanks to COVID-19. The last time the entire world came close to being as focused on a pandemic threat was over two decades ago, when HIV/AIDS was killing almost 4,000 people every day and new infections doubled year after year.
Since then, the global response to AIDS has become a success story, and AIDS-related deaths have been cut by more than half. Today,...
Falling on 11 October, International Day of the Girl Child is a United Nations day that brings attention to “girls’ rights and the unique challenges girls face around the world.” Empowering young girls early in life can give them the “potential to change the world — both as the empowered girls of today and as tomorrow’s workers, mothers, entrepreneurs, mentors, household heads, and political leaders.”
However, as we’ve seen with previous health crises, COVID-19’s lingering economic and social impacts on...
The COVID-19 pandemic has proven just how important strong health systems and both patient and healthcare worker safety is. With World Patient Safety Day falling on 17 September during a global health crisis, the gaps in our health systems are more apparent now than ever before.
At its core, World Patient Safety Day “calls for global solidarity and concentrated action by all countries and international partners to improve patient safety.” The current pandemic, unfortunately, has “unveiled the huge challenges health...