If G7 leaders don't take action, more of us will lose loved ones

This is a blog by Just Treatment supporter Alka Chohan.

I’m a healthcare worker from India, and I’ve lived in the UK for over thirty years. My dad recently died from COVID during the deadly third wave that has swept India. The impact of the disease has been catastrophic - so many people have lost their lives. Perhaps the hardest part is that so much of this loss could have been avoided. But as the G7 nations have just proven - the wealthy countries of the world, including the UK, are completely failing to take the action that’s needed to prevent even more needless deaths. 

The response of the G7 to the pandemic has been a complete failure. What the world needed was support for the solutions that developing countries have proposed to help rapidly scale up vaccine supply. What we got was a response that prioritises big pharma’s monopolies and which will fail to deliver the vaccines or treatments that are needed.

The UK has promised a measly 100m vaccine doses for developing countries, with just 5 million of these doses to be donated by the end of September. To put this into perspective, the UK has already administered over 70 million doses to its own population and has bought enough doses to vaccinate the whole UK population four times over. By the end of May 2021, 42% of people in G7 countries had received at least one vaccine dose, compared to less than 1% in low-income countries. Even the 1bn doses - enough to vaccinate around 500m people - promised by the G7 is a mere drop in the ocean compared to what is needed. 

To make matters worse, Boris Johnson is still blocking a proposal by India and South Africa to the World Trade Organisation to waive COVID monopolies and allow developing countries to manufacture their own vaccines. Instead this government is championing a pharmaceutical industry-led approach, which is excluding the Global South from decision-making. We need an urgent scale up of vaccine supply now - not inadequate commitments for next year. 

When my dad contracted COVID, he was really ill. My family booked an ambulance for him to a private hospital - but there were no ventilators. The private hospital only agreed to admit him in the end because my family signed a form to confirm that it wouldn’t be the fault of the hospital if he died. Although he initially responded well to treatment, he took a downward turn the next day. He died before he was able to get onto a ventilator.

It’s so hard to lose someone right now - but especially when we are separated from our loved ones. I couldn’t be with my dad or my family, or even travel for his funeral. The trauma that we went through in not being able to find the right treatment for him and not having a clear idea of his overall condition was extremely difficult. I wouldn’t want anyone else to experience what we have. 

Yet every day that goes by, more people in India are facing this kind of pain and loss. I still have family out there, and it’s devastating to see the news reports every day about how bad the situation is. Sadly, it’s too late to save my father. He was denied access to the critical care he needed that could have kept him alive. But there are still thousands more lives that are not yet lost, but that will be unless governments across the world take urgent action around vaccine access. Boris Johnson and the other G7 leaders have to stop standing in the way of the solutions that are needed to end this pandemic, or more and more people will go through what my family has experienced. We cannot let that happen. 

Last week we sent a letter, signed by over 1600 others, to Boris Johnson urging him to back a People’s Vaccine. Read and share the letter on Facebook and Twitter.