 Good morning everyone, at least good morning in Ann Arbor, Michigan. My apologies for the slight delay. My name is Shobita Parthasarathy. I'm Professor of Public Policy and the Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, known as STPP here at the Ford School of Public Policy. STPP is an interdisciplinary university-wide program dedicated to training students, conducting cutting-edge research, and informing the public and policymakers on issues at the intersection of technology, science, equity, society, and public policy. If you'd like to learn more about it, you can do so at our website, stpp.fordschool.umich.edu, and we will drop that link into the chat. Before I introduce today's event, I want to make a couple of quick announcements. First, for those of you who are interested in our graduate certificate program, the next deadline is March 1 of next year, and we'll be holding an information session about it on Tuesday, February 15 at 4pm. You can access registration details on our website. It will be held via Zoom. Second, the next event in the STPP lecture series during this academic year will feature Kumar Garg, Managing Director at Schmidt Futures, and the former Assistant Director in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. That event will be on Wednesday, January 26 at 4pm, and you can also register for that on our website. And now for today's event, we are hosting an important and timely conversation about global vaccine equity and health justice. Our featured guest today is social justice activist and human rights lawyer Fatima Hassan, who is the founder of the Health Justice Initiative in South Africa. An expert in human rights, especially in the context of HIV AIDS, Hassan has provided services to the AIDS Law Project and the Treatment Action Campaign, and was former co-director and founding trustee of Ndifuna Uqwazi. She has also served on the boards of the Wraith Foundation, South African Medicine San Frontiers, the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition, and the South African Council for Medical Schemes. She has a BA and LLB from the University of Whitwaterstrand and an LLM from Duke University, and clerked for Justice Kate O'Regan of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. She also served as special advisor to former Minister Barbara Hogan. Over the last two years, she has been a fierce campaigner advocating for global health equity through relaxing intellectual property restrictions on the COVID vaccines and increasing sharing and manufacturing capacity to low and middle income countries. And as you can imagine, just in the last week or so, she has become even busier than that. Yesterday she gave, she did an interview with Fareed Zakaria and CNN and she just joined us this morning from speaking with the WHO. In conversation with her will be Dr. Abdul al-Said, Kerry A. and Margaret D. Towsley Foundation policy, policymaker in residence at the Ford School of Public Policy here at University of Michigan. Dr. Abdul al-Said is a physician, academic and public servant who served as executive director of the Detroit Health Department and health officer for the city from 2015 to 2017. He was previously a system professor in the Department of Epidemiology at Columbia University. In 2018, following a bid for governor of Michigan, he founded South Paw Michigan, a political action committee aimed at helping elect progressive candidates. And in 2020 he served on the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on healthcare. He's currently a political contributor for CNN and the author of two books, Healing Politics, A Doctor's Journey into the Heart of Our Political Pandemic, and Medicare for All, a Citizen's Guide, which he coauthored with Micah Johnson. He also hosts a podcast about politics and health called America Dissected with Dr. al-Said. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our co-sponsors at the African Study Center, the Office of Global Public Health, and the Center for Global Health Equity for making this event possible. I want to thank our STPP staff, Mariam Nagaran, and Molly Kleinman. Ms. Hassan and Dr. al-Said will talk for about 30 minutes, and then there'll be time for audience questions and engagement afterwards. Please submit any questions through the Q&A function on Zoom. Ms. Hassan, Dr. al-Said, I'm so looking forward to your conversation, and I will turn it over to you. It's a privilege and honor to be here with you and grateful for your leadership in this area. I'm really excited to be in conversation with Ms. Fatima Hassan, really looking forward to what I know is going to be an important conversation, particularly in this moment. I want to just jump right in. First, actually, I'm not seeing Ms. Hassan here, so I just want to make sure that she is here with us. It looks like she is not. Oh, you are here. Just a minute. I'm going to figure out audio and video. I think there it is. What a day. Sometimes those days happen, but we're really grateful that you're here with us now. Let's jump right in. So obviously, the world was turned upside down last week. I can't believe it's been only a week with the recognition of the emergence of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus. It was discovered in large part because of South Africans, scientists and epidemiologists focus on the capacity for genomics surveillance and doing the good work of telling the world about what they had identified, and that explains unclear exactly where the variant emerged. Can you give us a picture of what has transpired over the last week? We know that cases have started to skyrocket there. What is the situation on the ground as you all are experiencing right now? Thanks, and thanks, Abdul and the rest of the team for organizing this webinar and sorry for all the technical problems in a day of intimate and internet access. We have coupled with an increase in infections because of the new variant, and like you mentioned earlier that South African scientists as well as science from Botswana first alerted the world to the variant. So the variant wasn't discovered in South Africa, it was just first reported from parts of Southern Africa. It's not transpired as you would have seen. I think it's the irony of the Dutch authorities basically holding a plane from South Africa on the summit for multiple hours and requiring everybody to test themselves and then either quarantine or there are other measures implemented that the variant was actually circulating in the Netherlands a week before. It was actually discovered in the skills in parts of Southern Africa. So the mood on the ground is basically one of real anger, I think, because on the one hand our scientists have played a significant role because of the advanced genomic surveillance systems we have in sharing data, we have been blocking some secretive and being transparent, but the response has been, you know, frankly one that smacks of racism, right, the Niger travel ban that has included most Southern African countries, I mean it's so laughable if it wasn't so incredulous. It's not countries where the variant has already been found and where the variant is circulating and what we know so far is that, I mean you would know this better than epidemiologists, is that there's already community transmission and it's now found in multiple parts of the world and it's certainly not limited to Southern Africa. I think that the response to the disclosure of information and the increase in the number of transmissions in our parts of the world has been the response of the world from the beginning of this pandemic, which is, you know, we'll talk left and we'll walk right. It's a language of double speech that will offer you solidarity, but instead what we'll do is we'll either isolate you, we'll either unfairly discriminate against your countries or we'll deny you access to life-saving vaccines at the same time as the rest of you would get access to. And so, you know, the worst thing that could have happened is we get the travel ban and then we find out that more booster shots have actually been administered in the last four months in the Global North than full shots have been actually administered in Southern Africa and the rest of Africa and I'm sure we'll talk about that later. So, yeah, if you want to understand why people in Southern Africa and particularly South Africa and Botswana are furious, you know, that's just some of the context for where we're at. I really appreciate that point and I think the point about context is an important one. And I think sometimes when we talk about COVID-19 we act as if this was the first global pandemic in our lifetimes and it was not. In fact, the one that we should often be paying attention to to understand the circumstances that are arising here at the at the meeting point between global geopolitics and economics is HIV AIDS. It's just we don't call it a pandemic simply because we undervalue the lives that it infected, whether it was LGBTQ people here at home or black folks abroad. And can you give us a sense of the way that HIV AIDS as a global phenomenon has sort of set the stage for the public understanding of this moment and what lessons we can glean as we get into the particularities of this particular pandemic and the vaccine. Thanks. I mean, great question. You know, the most obvious similarity between the HIV AIDS crisis and this pandemic has been one of inequity, right? And so the HIV AIDS response was characterized by a delay in a refusal to acknowledge the seriousness of the epidemic first in white gay men in the U.S. And then later on, black and brown people, both LGBTI communities as well as heterosexual communities and particularly black women in Africa. That was sort of towards the early 2000s and late 2000s. But the one common characteristics between the two pandemics when I talk about inequality is just the lack of access. And so, you know, you will find that the people who had been working on access to HIV AIDS treatment, affordable supplies, timely supplies, greater manufacturing, you know, the same things that we've seen in COVID. The similar group of people have rejoined basically to fight for access to, you know, equity, to equitable access to tests, to diagnostics, to treatment and vaccines in this pandemic because, you know, one of the reasons we did that was because we saw what impact that would have, the stranglehold of intellectual property, the inability to be able to access life-saving technologies on a timely basis. It basically costs you lives. I mean, forget the money and forget the economies, but you just have needless suffering and you have needless death. I mean, we've seen this pandemic already at least five million deaths. We think that that's an underestimate. We think that there's an underestimate of global cases as well because that requires, you know, testing capability and capacity. But the similarities are so much so that it's the same companies, you know, the fights that we're having, it always feels deja vu for me of what we had to deal with 20 years ago. It's the same practice manual of the CEOs of the pharmaceutical companies, maybe the individuals may have changed, but it's the same arguments. It's the same tactics. It's the same racist tropes that are being flung about. I mean, the most recent thing is that, you know, in the minds of CEOs, which is what they told us in HIV-Aid, that there isn't an issue with supplies or scaling up manufacturing or that it's not their fault that there's this uneven access to vaccines around the world. That it's our fault. We don't want to take the vaccine. We are hesitant. We are anti-vaxxers. Without understanding the global context in which we are in, you know, many of the anti-vaxx movements that are alive and well in South Africa have their roots in the U.S. I mean, you saw what happened in Germany in the last 24 hours. So, you know, there's a real far-righting, fascist movement around individual liberties about people who are opposed to mask men, people who are opposed to vaccine mandates. And so the issue of systemic power, the issue of politics, the issue of racism, the issue of keeping out black people through travel bans, you know, I don't know if you saw both the German and Spanish newspapers had this really racist cartoons about keeping black people out because of the new variants. And, you know, like I mentioned earlier, the irony was that it was actually circulating in Europe before. So, I mean, I could speak to you for hours about the similarities. But let me just basically say that the same issues that we had around intellectual property being the greatest barrier to timely access. And timely supplies of the things that could take you out of a pandemic is the same thing we've seen in this pandemic. And I just want to, you know, emphasize the word timely. Because if you're getting your vaccine in January, and I'm getting my vaccine in December, that's 11 months apart. This is why we have variants. This is why we've created the fertile ground for variants to emerge and for them to circulate. And this is what we were trying to emphasize from last year already as the people vaccine alliance globally that timing in this pandemic is so important. Otherwise, you're going to have a situation like HIV age where you're 18 years, five years, three years for access to the same things that you can benefit from in the rich north, which in the meantime, basically, not just cost you life, but it's also costing us in new variants. I want to, there's a lot of really important, very rich analysis that you just offered here and I want to, I want to break that down a little bit I just want to start first with, with the role of intellectual property and the way that this debate has yet again fallen on the question of control and the question of a profit. You know, you've been a leader in trying to get COVID-19 vaccines distributed more widely more equitably, in particular to low and middle income countries. And toward that end as a mechanism, you supported waving intellectual property rights for the corporations that that that hold on to these patents. That implies sharing the know how and then also building manufacturing facilities and low and middle income countries. Can you speak to the role of the trips waiver in particular, explain what that is and, and why waving it, waving trips is the best approach here. So, I think it also links to your previous question about the HIV AIDS crisis and the lessons we learned in this in that pandemic, that if you don't actually deal with the systemic issues and the rules of the global trade system, which is basically contained in something like the trips agreement, which is part of the World Trade Organization global trade body with member states and, you know, most states are members of the World Trade Organization so that they can basically trade as, as supposed equal trading partners. So the idea with the trips waiver was that quite early on because of the lessons of the HIV AIDS crisis quite early on in this pandemic. There's a recognition that if you don't address the issue of IP barriers, and it's not just patent, it's copyright, straight secrets, there's a range of elements that make up intellectual property protection. If those are not suspended, just temporarily, just for the duration of this pandemic, just for essential COVID-19 technologies, then you're going to have greater obstacles to be able to scale up access and to be able to scale up the industry. It relates to PPE, it relates to ventilators, it relates to diagnostic test kits. There's a lot of focus on vaccines, but that's just one part of it. So in October of last year already before the vaccines were even approved for use or were given emergency use authorization, there was a proposal made by the South African and Indian government to ask member states to temporarily suspend intellectual property protection to create an equal playing field that you wouldn't have to worry in each country about possible IP or patent infringement of a particular company's technology and will come to whose technology it is, right? Because there's a huge debate around does Moderna own the IP, does the US government own it, does AstraZeneca own the IP, or does Oxford University own it, given the amount of public investment. And in many cases we argue that the people of Britain and the people of the US actually own the vaccine, the people's vaccine, because public money is used to research it. But that aside, the idea was to have a very quick, easy way so that we wouldn't all have to do issue compulsory licenses and fight for voluntary licenses and fight for the right to scale up manufacturing. Using capacity that exists in Latin America and Asia and Africa to also scale up production so that you're not just reliant on a plant in Baltimore, ironically, which became one of the greatest Achilles heels of the Johnson and Johnson rollout, right? Because of the contamination issue then, or you're not just reliant on a planting later, for example in Europe, but you could also then use other capacity. And it's been blocked. It's been blocked over a year by the very countries that wanted accelerated vaccine research that are administering booster shops that are promising donations to us but don't want to deal with the biggest systemic issues. But what we had in the HIV AIDS crisis, a crisis again of equity and a crisis of power, because the people who are actually calling the shots and we've been very vocal about this are four white men who are the CEOs of these pharmaceutical companies who come from the region. They are deciding markets, they are deciding prices, they are deciding what indemnification they want, what liability protection they want, they are deciding whether the contract is open or not open, whether there's not disclosure agreements. They also decide where supplies go to first. So there's no transparency on delivery schedules. I mean we call that delivery visibility. And this is the reason why when we've had to rely on a handful of manufacturers without the IP relaxation, without the trips waiver, why it's been a really difficult battle to be able to scale up manufacturers. That has resulted in a drip feed of supplies to Africa and parts of Latin America and South Africa. For the better part of the up until October, we had a drip feed of supplies. The data is on our website at Health Justice Initiative. So you can actually see based on the numbers the affinity has given the state of economists as providers, the state of our world and data, you know, it has all of the different tables. The evidence is there of the drip feed of supplies of vaccines into low income countries and covex too has been unable to meet supplies. So at the heart of it is, we would have been in a very different situation if that waiver had been approved in December, it had been approved in January, February. In fact, even if it's approved right now, we could be in a different situation in two years time because what's clear with the variant is we, we all going to have to get booster shots. Right. So the market for vaccines has just, I think, tripled. I want to jump into this right because the opponents of the trips waiver include a number of high income countries, the Gates Foundation, obviously the pharmaceutical industry and they make a number of claims to defend their position here. They say, well, the capacity to manufacture vaccines is limited in low and middle income countries. They say that the real limitation to vaccine access isn't actually the vaccine supply. It's the last mile problem, as they say, they say that, you know, it would slow the capacity to address and pivot if we needed to in the face of the variant. That's what they say. I'm hoping maybe you can respond to some of these, some of these assertions that they make and tell us what why they really do oppose the trips waiver. Sure. Okay. So that's a lot of questions wrapped into one. Let me, let me take them one at a time. So the, this assumption that the global south can't make diagnostic kits or vaccines or treatments is we believe wrong. And it's wrong because we think it's rooted in a lot of racism and a lot of myths about what our true capacity for production is. There's been an investigative piece done by Stephanie Nolan of the New York Times basically went around the world and spoke to all available manufacturing partners and shown that there's ample existing manufacturing capacity, even in Africa. The WHO invited expressions of interest from partners in the global south as well as in the global north to be participants in what's called the mRNA WHO helps one of which which is actually being set up in South Africa. Pfizer and Madonna are bypassing them. They refuse to cooperate and share their technology. They are companies in Latin America that were told the same thing in the HIV AIDS crisis companies in Asia companies in Africa. So, so we believe that they are companies around the world, including even a company in Canada who said that they're willing to manufacture that vaccine for a country like Bolivia, but the Canadian government refuses to take on the power of Johnson and Johnson and issue a license to Johnson and Johnson refuses to voluntarily give a license to this company. So, the one thing we've been dealing with is this, you know, this myth that there isn't capacity and we've shown that they use and that this is an incorrect assumption. The second is that if you ask the company nicely they'll give you a license that's been the furthest from the truth. Every single effort has been attempted with the CEOs of these companies to voluntarily share their technology to transfer the knowledge to participate in the mRNA hubs they refuse. So when I said earlier, the CEOs are playing God in this pandemic and they make all the decisions. They will bypass an mRNA hub that has been set up to scale up a manner mRNA vaccines and instead do bilateral deals with one or two companies which which have limitations on geography limitations on volumes. And usually those license are finished. They're not even full manufacturing licenses. So the reason why we believe coming to, you know, the second part of your question, why there is such an existential crisis in the pharmaceutical community and why they are lobbying so hard with the support of people like Paul Gates. Because his foundation has now done a uten and they've now said they support the relaxation of IP but there are certain global philanthropists who unfortunately put a lot of money into global health and they have had a chilling effect on the ability of people to speak out in support of the waiver. But not for standing with Bob Gates has to think. I mean, the Vatican supports a relaxation of IP Nobel laureates support that 100 countries do formal world leaders do. So I really think that both Gates and people who believe what he does in relation to this waiver, he's called it the stupidest idea inverted from us. It's naive and foolish. Will one day be judged as, you know, being on the wrong side of history, but we believe that the real reason why the industry and a few global leaders, the US, the UK, Norway, Switzerland, and obviously the EU, particularly Germany, and the UK Boris Johnson are so opposed to the waiver. So it's a handful of nations blocking what 100 countries, 110 countries now actually want. It's because if you allow this waiver, I think in their mind, then you basically say that intellectual property is secondary to human rights and to the right to life. And if you allow this in this pandemic, I think there is a fear on their part, but they will never be able to claw back on the excessive protections and exclusivity that IP gives you on life saving medicine. Because if you open the door in this pandemic on COVID-19 technologies, then the next we're going to want the flexibility on any other life saving medicine. And this is the battle we've had for the last 40 years about what happened was really immoral and unethical to include medicines into the TRIPS agreement. It wasn't always like that. It was the role of Pfizer and its CEO at that time that basically brought intellectual property protections and pharmaceutical products. So the pharmaceutical industry is very powerful, more profitable than oil and gas. It's a really powerful industry. I mean, you've seen the billions that all of these companies have made in the last year. The announcement of the variant actually made the stock value of Moderna shoot up. Right. So there is the bottom line reason for why these companies and their lobbyists and they've gone to Congress to even the US Congress to say that they don't support the waiver. I think that for them, this is an existential crisis. And finally, I think linked to what we saw with HIV is if you wave IP, you give up control and give up power. You can't then choose which partners, which country, which markets. And our assessment of the industry at the moment is they want absolute control and that manifests in the way in which they've given these partial licenses as well. But any stuff if you want to delve into that deeper. No, I really appreciate that. And that, you know, I think folks who have been thinking about about prescription drug policy in this country see an obvious set of parallels. The prescription drug industry has spent 4.3 billion that's worth of B in lobbying alone over the past 20 years and we're having a robust conversation right now in the course of the build back better package about whether or not Medicare, the single largest buyer of prescription drugs should have the right to negotiate prescription drugs on behalf of seniors in this country. A third of whom report a third of whom report rationing their medications because they can't afford it. And so it is the same kind of greed that we see that focuses only simply on corporate bottom lines that despite the iron of the fact that we largely the American taxpayers are are investing in the research that then turns into these prescription drugs and the thing that I think it's important to remember is that prescription drug companies. Spend more on marketing than they do on research and and development of their products and it's everything that you need to understand about what they are these are large in effect private equity firms they take investments in biomedical compounds and the ones that pan out end up paying for everything else and some and and here we are and it's keeping people in this country from getting access to their medications and it's keeping people abroad from getting access to this vaccine in the context of a global pandemic. Where are we now on the trips waiver conversation is there some light at the end of this very dark. You know, Greek alphabet laden tunnel or or are we right back where we were. Yeah, so, I mean, I think the next period they should call inequality right because I think that's that's where we are. So we were very yeah. So we were supposed to have the WTO ministerial meeting it's called empty talk about a week ago but just on the eve of everybody actually getting on the plane to go to Geneva to have this yet another meeting which this time was going to be in person to trash up hopefully the final text of the trip flavor the variant image and that's when everybody was banned and basically the meeting has been postponed indefinitely of course the push by activists and advocates like us, you know, is that and this campaign is really being led by people who work at the network by the South Center by MSF access campaign and obviously groups in the US like for all and help have an IMAC, who, you know, incidentally have also done a lot of the work around prescription medicines in the US and the issue of screening patterns and have really been lobbying the US Congress around the reforming the entire US patterns and medicine regulatory and pricing system because that has an impact on us. You know, whatever happens in the US, but Philly and other fires or JJ has a direct impact on us and our ability to access affordable medicine. So, where we add to the waiver is that the meeting that is supposed to trash all of this art has not been postponed, we are saying that you don't need to have an interest in meeting you can have a virtual meeting on zoom and pass this waiver. We're getting to the point where 110 countries support the waiver. Like we said, there are a few blockers, and we tried to increase the pressure on these governments in relation to why they continue blocking it because they really are on the wrong side of history. And if the blocking continues beyond the end of this year, then I think one tells us that the world's priorities are really not about equity in this pandemic or global solidarity, even though they promised that it's more about prioritizing IP claim. But the second option is to actually call for a vote. So the WTO operates on a model of consensus building, but actually you can't pass the waiver by by going to vote. The, the, the spanning the works is that your government provided an administration decided earlier this year, which was significant and not so significant, you know, time will tell one never me or write the books about this pandemic. We'll have to see where the Biden's move, you know, was was strategic or whether it was really rooted in trying to actually save lives and the US indicated through Captain Hyde, the WTO, the trade investor that they would support the partial waiver but only in relation to vaccines, not in relation to all other medical technologies and so that position the US as somewhat kind of in the middle of what we support you on some part about everything, while the EU in the UK is holding out in the EU in the response, it's quite incredulous. You know, the EU, particularly because of the position of Germany, Switzerland, Norway, and then obviously also the UK and the Boris Johnson administration has been about protecting pharmaceutical interests and taking that technology has said that we shouldn't use the waiver as the mechanism. We should use something called the third way, and the third way is the EU's supposed solution to dealing with a fast moving pandemic, but all of a sudden now 25 years later after we've been asking for compulsory licenses, you know, an HIV aid medicine to use compulsory licensing as a mechanism to try and deal with every single access issue, which is not feasible compulsory licensing mechanisms that really ever been used successfully when you see what's happening in Canada. And when you do try and invoke compulsory licensing measures and usually what happens is the pharmaceutical industry lawyers up and you know you basically spend years in court before you can even try and achieve that so I'm not, I mean on the one hand I'm trying to be optimistic, but on the other hand, the situation is getting worse, more people are getting sick and dying, we really don't have sufficient supplies of vaccines let alone diagnostic kits and you know we worry that next year we're going to now start treatment as the FDA is looking at data around what Merck and Pfizer basically announces the preliminary data on some of the empty files. I want to ask you so on that front. We, we saw that Merck in particular agreed to offer licenses for manufacturing abroad in effect bypassing this trips waiver question. Do you have, do you feel like that is an effort to get ahead of this particular issue and and then create sort of an alternative system that they can then gain or do you feel like this is in good faith. So, you know, I'll never regard any action by pharmaceutical company in the middle of a pandemic as necessarily one of good faith. And the reason why I say that is when you look at the terms and conditions of that particular license, which we believe is quite restrictive and excludes multiple countries and at least about 40% of the world population. So, the, the way we view that particular move is that one it's around trying to get ahead, like you said after trips waiver and the demand for the lifting of IP protections to be in total control of the geographies of the terms of the licensing and to try and control who who the partners are in this particular configuration of actors. And it's not a universal non exclusive general access license. If it was, then I would be the first to say, well done, you've actually done the first, you know, universal non exclusive license, but that is not the case. So they've, they pick and choose countries like you're picking, you know, fruits in a supermarket or which countries are in the territory which countries are not in the territory. The issue obviously for Latin America is that Brazil, as Ali has been excluded from the territories of the licenses. So what it does these licenses if they're not, if they're not done in a way which is totally non exclusive and universal which says everybody can share the technology and everybody can use it everywhere is it then creates domestic obstacles. So if you are territory that's been excluded, for example in the one license that we've got with Pfizer they said only the South African public sector can be in the territory. Some people in South Africa use what's called the private sector, even low income workers, because they are low income medical schemes. So it then becomes even more difficult for activists in each country to be able to access a cheap generic version of those treatments right, given what they estimate to cost them a private market seven hundred dollars for a five day measurement. For example, there's already warning bells around who's going to be able to access them when and at what price and this goes back to the battles we had for the age of eight. So, so no I don't I don't necessarily see them in total good faith. And I think what they do is they segment markets. And that is the problem with restricted licensing. If you create further segmentation you create a further division in countries within countries and across countries. But I can guarantee you that you'll get those treatments before we'll be able to get our hands on them. And, you know, it will take us years before we can access the same kind of treatment region and that you'll be able to within your own country of course you're going to have communities that will never be able to access the treatment. They'll just be too expensive. And so what happens, which is what usually happens in every academic and pandemic, the rich will be able to buy their way out of the pandemic and the poor will will not. I want to move to a couple questions from from the audience. First, first question is what role can scientists and academics play in advocating for vaccine equity and show meaningful support for something like the trips waiver. Yeah, great question. So there's already been, you know, as part of the Croy conference has been something called the Croy declaration on vaccine equity. And there's been, which is different from the HIV AIDS pandemic is that within the space of a few months we have scientists and academics, particularly IP epidemics who are also coming out on the side of activists who are calling for trips waiver. So I think there's two things that can be done. The one is to join the global, you know, calls for solidarity and signing on to the different declarations, which are really just words. But, but I think the more important thing that can be done is in the relationship and the contacting and the ethical research that one has to undertake with these pharmaceutical companies. There has to be a greater questioning of why are we doing clinical trials and research for you, or your request if we're not going to ensure global universal access. If there's no post trial meaningful access and what is the point of scientific research, if you can't benefit from the fruits of scientific knowledge. I mean, the irony of that is that we did four clinical trials in my country. My friends and family took part in the J&J, Aspen, AstraZeneca, Novavax trial and we were not guaranteed access up front. In fact, other countries like Canada and Australia that maybe did less even on clinical research were able to benefit as priority customers on vaccine access. I think that that is one of the questions of we can't have a repeat of this with the treatment. We can't have a repeat of this now as vaccines potentially come into the market as booster shots to deal with the multiple bears. And then there's academics. I mean, I think there's a there's a movement of progressive academics that are doing two things. One, calling for the transfer, but secondly, calling out the racism. And what's been surprising in the last week is that academics and scientists, for example, in South Africa have decided like enough, they're just speaking out about the racism about being on the receiving end of two things travel ban, vaccine inequity, which we believe has led to the situation of more variants, but then also what they are calling the appropriation of data from the global south. So we during the work during the research presenting and sharing the data and the data that's taken by by the global north. I think, you know, this pandemic. I think it's a portal to to to the systemic inequalities and global issues that we've always had to be dealing with. And the pandemic is this pandemic. I think it's just bringing to the full all of the issues that we've neglected for the last 25 years after the age of age crisis, because we've got the dark decoration and reportable to never do this to us again. But here we are in the exact same position. It's not worse. I appreciate deeply that point and it has been a scale free accelerator of the mechanisms of inequity and whether you're talking about inequity on a global scale and equity on a local scale we watched as low income people and people have been historically marginalized by colonialism and racism constantly beyond on the worst set of things and that's just on the healthcare side. We haven't even talked about the economic consequences and the impact that travel bands have on an economy and and disproportionately on the lowest income people in that economy. I want to quickly, we've got about one more minute and I just wanted to ask you we were honored to host Dr. Gabriel I source here at at the university, and he expressed some really profound concern about the inequity of people in the United States as you mentioned getting into the shots before a lot of folks got their first shots abroad in particular in in in much of Sub-Saharan Africa and I want to ask you if you could just comment on on your perspective on the ethics of this issue and in particular the fact that, you know, people point to hesitancy is a function of information and the reality of it is that we gave disinformation a lot more of a head start because of the lack of access to vaccines early on. So I'd love to hear your perspective on this. I mean, I'm so glad you said that because that's the point we've been trying to convey the timing makes us so much in a pandemic and so we seven months behind you in vaccination. That's when you have best, you know, hesitancy and the anti-vax movement growing, but I think that the WHO DG, you know, has been right on the money and he's been calling out the inequities since day one. It's not just the booster shots and I agree with you it's totally unethical to be doing third and fourth shots when most people including healthcare workers in Africa haven't been vaccinated. They haven't even protected the front line. Seven percent vaccine rate in Africa is actually shameful. One in four healthcare workers in Africa have only been vaccinated. That means three out of every four people who are, you know, working in a hospital or in a clinical facility about vaccinated. So I think the inequity is not just about the booster doses or the unethical part, not just about the booster doses. It's the fact that all healthcare workers and people over 70 in every part of the world have not been vaccinated. And we asked for that in February. He said this in January, February already that before we administer even first shots to somebody like you or somebody like me, let's make sure that we reach the people who are most at risk. And, you know, people said they would do that and then they didn't. And that is what we call vaccine nationalism. It's difficult, of course, because a lot of these countries are saying that our people, people who voted for us have said that we've got to protect our own first. But I think that's at the heart of the inequity that the nationalism that we've seen has been such epic proportions that of the 7.2 billion doses vaccines administered in the world, the majority went to high income countries. That tells you that we really don't just have an ethics problem, but we also have an equity, a human rights, a systemic and IP. It's, you know, everything has has culminated, which is perfect reading grounds. I think for hesitancy for new variants circulate for irrational responses which I've cultured in public health language, and then obviously for in equity, which is, you know, all of all of the things that an anti-vac movement is thriving on right now. Well, I really, really appreciate this opportunity to engage in conversation and I'm going to go ahead and thank you and then hand it back off to Professor Parthasarathy who's going to take it from here. Thank you so much, Abdul and Fatima. That was just a wonderful, wonderful conversation. So important. And I think you did such an extraordinary job of conveying the gravity of the situation and not just the gravity, but I think it's sometimes difficult to see how seemingly technical decisions. You know, as you said, why are we doing this research in the first place? What is the point if we're not ensuring access is something that I think a lot of the folks on the Zoom, especially, you know, a lot of our community comes from the sciences and engineering and that's really what brought them to be part of this program. And so that's something that I think is very motivating for a lot of my students and a lot, as I said, in our community. But in addition to that, I think that your perspective from South Africa is something that is extremely important and yet we don't hear enough in the west. And so I really appreciate that. And I am so thankful that you're out there fighting this fight and I hope that you have, that we have something to be optimistic about moving forward. And Abdul, thank you so much for your wonderful provocations and being such a wonderful interlocutor. I think, again, kind of connecting the debates temporarily between the HIV AIDS crisis and the current pandemic in South Africa, but then, you know, the global context in the U.S. And the debate about drug prices is so important because I think there are lots of places where we can all intervene in addressing this nexus of health equity, intellectual property and science and and hopefully that gave some of the viewers some ideas about about how they might do that. So thank you both very, very much. I greatly enjoyed this. And thank you for managing all of the technical challenges to be with us today. I'm sure you have a super busy schedule. So we'll see you both soon. I hope take care.