A group of African scientists is urging their governments to demand a review of the role of global North-based international health organisations in shaping the new global pandemic preparedness and response treaty before its finalisation at the World Health Assembly in May.
The group – known as the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group – says international health policies should prioritise low-income countries with high disease burdens, criticising the current draft as “colonialist”.
“The lockdown regulations, which were imposed during COVID-19, and which are still being reinforced in the draft instruments, were a class-based and unscientific instrument, causing significant collateral harm to lower-income people and useless for crowded informal settings as in urban parts of Africa,” the group said in a statement.
“Lockdowns affected Africans badly because these are people who earn their living from subsistent income, and yet you lock them in for several months?”
Wellington Oyibo, medical parasitologist at the University of Lagos
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