 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. On May 24th, at the opening of the World Health Assembly, the Director General of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Gebriosis stated the world was on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure. He was referring to the gross inequities in vaccine distribution prevalent even today and year and a half into the pandemic after nearly 173 million cases and 3.7 million deaths worldwide. Almost 85% of all COVID vaccines administered till date have been in high-income and upper-middle-income countries. The poorest countries, meanwhile, have still only received 0.3% of all vaccine doses. Vaccine hoarding policies of rich nations in the global North has led to where we are today. Tedros further stated in his speech, the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world's poorest countries. This is what we have been witnessing as rich nations have enough vaccines to inoculate children as young as 12 years old, a very low-risk age group, even as poorer countries don't even have enough vaccines for their health workers. The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access facility that is COVAX, which was created to ensure vaccine access for poorer nations, has also only been able to reach a limited number of people. COVAX relies on high-income countries, companies and philanthropic organizations for funds, but its funds have fallen far short of what was needed to compete with rich nations that cornered the market by reserving most of the vaccine supplies for themselves. Now COVAX is facing further challenges as its main supplier, the Serum Institute of India, has pulled back to see to the vaccine shortage at home as India slowly recovers from a devastating second wave. Serum might resume exports to COVAX sometime before December, but if it doesn't, COVAX could be short of 1 billion doses by the year's end. Even in the face of this crisis, with the loss of millions of lives and the global economy nosediving, pharma companies are continuing to fiercely guard their vaccine technologies behind patents and IP rights. The COVID-19 technology access pool or CTAB was launched by WHO in May last year, with the purpose of getting vaccine makers to share their know-how and allow for transfer of technology to others who could then increase vaccine production. However, it is yet to get any participants as big pharma continues to prioritize profits over people's lives. In order to bypass these patents, India and South Africa presented a proposal at the World Trade Organization in October to waive intellectual property rights for a limited time period on COVID vaccines and products. This has also made little headway. While the US has now agreed to support text-based negotiations for a waiver on vaccines alone, even this small concession is being opposed by countries of the European Union, UK, Australia and Singapore. In addition to vaccine shortages, the entire health care system of dozens of countries across the world has been further crippled by unilateral sanctions and blockades imposed by the US and its allies. In the ongoing session of World Health Assembly, several member countries drew attention to the urgent necessity to lift these coercive measures imposed on countries such as Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Zimbabwe amid the COVID-19 pandemic. These measures place barriers on access to medical supplies, personal protective equipment and vaccines, constraining the ability of these countries to protect their population. Venezuela, for instance, has received vaccines from China and Russia. However, its payment to the COVAX initiative got delayed due to the country's financial challenges affecting its mass inoculation process. At least 39 countries are facing such sanctions. Palestine meanwhile has not just been affected by inequitable vaccine distribution, it is reeling under a system of vaccine apartheid. Israel has among the highest vaccination rates for COVID-19 in the world, surpassing countries like the US, UK, Germany etc. The Israeli occupying forces are also responsible for providing health care for Palestinians, but they have hardly been vaccinated. Nearly 62.9% of Israeli citizens had received at least one short of a COVID-19 vaccine as of May 26, as opposed to only 5.7% Palestinians of a population of 5.2 million. The difference in vaccination rates is clearly reflected in the number of COVID-19 cases. Since the pandemic started last year, the worst day for Israel was in January 17th when it had 996 cases per 1 million people. However, with ever-increasing vaccinations, the cases declined fast, reaching 6 cases per million by 8th May. On the same day, Palestinians had 125 cases per million. Worldwide life is beginning to return to normal in countries with high vaccination rates, while for others the end of the crisis still remains out of sight. Some rich nations are now beginning to state that they will derail the extra vaccine doses they had bought earlier. Others among these countries are still unwilling to give away their surplus shots in face of future variants that may arise in countries that remain unprotected.