Everything You Wanted To Know About Non-Western Covid Vaccines But Were Afraid To Ask
This talk dealt with the geopolitics of vaccine distribution in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic when the entire world faced a shortage of coronavirus vaccines. Achal Prabhala spoke about how to overcome the credibility gap faced by vaccines from China, Russia, and India. In doing so, he touched upon how to move the centre of pharmaceutical innovation beyond a handful of western countries in order to achieve better outcomes for the entire world, including the west itself.
About the Public Health Activist
Achal Prabhala is a public health activist, the coordinator of the AccessIBSA Project (www.accessibsa.org) and a fellow of the Shuttleworth Foundation. The AccessIBSA project is a tri-continental project set up to expand access to life-saving drugs in the developing world, specifically India, Brazil and South Africa. He has worked to drive change in the legal and policy frameworks that have underpinned the development and manufacture of medicines for decades.
Over the course of the pandemic, he has worked on increasing access to coronavirus vaccines in India and other low-income countries in the world, by advocating for intellectual property waivers and transfers of technology, by critically evaluating the vaccine regulatory system and by examining problems in the vaccine manufacturing supply chain.
