The coronavirus threatens to blow us up even further, said the head of UNAIDS. (Representative)
Geneva:
Millions of people have died needlessly from AIDS-related causes due to lack of access to existing therapies, said the head of UNAIDS, calling for a fairer approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic.
Winnie Byanyima fears how two decades ago in her hometown in Uganda, she and others struggled to find funds to help a close friend with HIV get treatment antiretrovirals she needed.
“At that time, it was about $ 800 a month … Her salary was less than $ 100 a month,” Byanyima told AFP in an interview, describing how her friend Jane sometimes met enough for a month. to be forced to skip the next one.
“She died six months before the price dropped from $ 10,000 a year to $ 100 a year.”
Byanyima, 61, took over the reins almost a year ago at UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Program on HIV and AIDS based in Geneva.
Speaking at the time when his organization launched its annual report, Byanyima praised “considerable progress” in the fight against HIV / AIDS since the pandemic began four decades ago, including more than half of the annual deaths. from the peak of 1.7 million in 2004 to 690,000 last year.
But she lamented that from the start, the development of treatments and the continuous search for a vaccine were largely left to the private sector.
She called for a radical change in tactics as the world faces the immense challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Popular vaccine”
She urged countries to “learn from the bad experience of AIDS when the drugs were found, but it took 10 years before people in our region in Africa could benefit from them.”
“If you count the number of lives lost in 10 years, we are talking about millions.”
To avoid a similar scenario with the new coronavirus, UNAIDS has been among the strongest supporters of the development of a “popular vaccine” and of equitable and just access to all the treatments found.
“This time, let’s create a communal pool,” said Byanyima.
The World Health Organization launched a global initiative in April to accelerate the development and production of COVID-19 tests, vaccines and treatments and ensure equitable access.
Byanyima stressed the need to ensure that every region and country has access to affordable vaccines and treatments and that they “distribute free to people”, first serving health workers and the most vulnerable.
“It cannot be that (the) rich come to reserve supplies and everyone dies while waiting for those who are not at risk but who are rich to be vaccinated,” she said.
It condemned reports that the United States and some European countries were reserving supplies for one of the most advanced candidate vaccines, developed by Astra Zeneca and the University of Oxford.
Washington also announced that it had purchased more than 90% of the global stockpile of antiviral drug remdesivir to treat COVID-19.
“It’s not fair. This virus hits everyone,” said Byanyima. “We need global solutions … Not a leading solution.”
“Off road’
The rush to find vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, in which governments inject billions of dollars into research projects, highlights the “failure” of the old model of letting pharmaceutical companies search profit to pave the way for medical research and development, Says Byanyima.
And changing the model to deal with the coronavirus crisis could have huge benefits, including perhaps speeding up the search for an HIV vaccine, she said.
“If we can align the world with a new model for the development and distribution of health technologies, it will certainly have an impact on solutions for HIV as well as for others,” she said.
Byanyima highlighted a large number of diseases affecting poor countries without treatment because companies have determined that investing in their development will not be profitable financially.
“Lives must come before profits,” she said.
The coronavirus pandemic, for its part, is likely to worsen the global HIV / AIDS situation considerably.
Byanyima warned that the world was “already on the right track” and would miss the goal of reducing AIDS-related deaths to less than 500,000 by this year, while more than 12.5 million of the 38 million people living with HIV are still not receiving treatment.
“The coronavirus threatens to blow us up even more,” she said, stressing her agency’s warning that stopping antiretroviral therapy could cause more than 500,000 additional deaths in Africa alone.
And the gains from mother-to-child transmission could decline by 10 years.
It is “totally unacceptable,” she said.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
