The Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned and the Fight for Health Equity

The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced the end of the declaration of the pandemic as a global emergency, but has emphasized that it will continue with us, and has asked countries to combat it on their local agendas.

The pandemic officially claimed seven million fatalities, but the WHO itself considers that there is considerable underreporting, and that there have probably been 20 million deaths. Also that 700 million infections have officially occurred, a figure that is also underestimated.

The epidemic that began in March 2020 also caused two and a half years of global economic stagnation and enormous psychosocial and family damage to people, and left millions of children out of school.

Some extractable lessons from this catastrophe, one of the largest that humanity has experienced.

1. Huge inequalities exacerbated their spread and severity. The virus advanced without barriers on the excluded populations. The very high levels of malnutrition, lack of drinking water, miserable housing and lack of sanitary facilities, acted as social determinants that created a huge vulnerable population.

This population also lacked medical protection systems. The pandemic was totally unequal, hitting especially the most vulnerable. For example, in the three countries with the highest victims: USA, India and Brazil, the incidence figures were much higher in the humble population.

2. If the inequalities in the world were lower, the mortality figures would have been considerably lower.

3. The joint action of the public and private sectors was a formidable success, the discovery of vaccines in record time, but inequalities created a strong barrier for them to reach the most vulnerable. According to the WHO, 30% of the world’s population has not yet received any vaccine, leaving them defenseless.

4. The delay in supplying the vaccine facilitated the appearance of new strains that were complicating the problem.

5. A special case was that of Brazil, where President Bolsonaro, instead of protecting the population, minimized and denied the pandemic. It is estimated that the country would have had half the number of deaths if the government had faced the fight against the virus accordingly.

6. Another unexpected adversary was the resistance of groups of various kinds to the validity of the vaccines. For mainly ideological reasons, they encouraged not to get vaccinated. In the USA, 1/3 of the population resisted getting vaccinated, influenced by far-right extremist sectors.

7. Social networks were a fertile field for the penetration of conspiracies by white supremacists and other racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic groups, who claimed that the vaccine was a plot to take over the minds of the poor, that George Soros was behind them. and Bill Gates.

8. Women lost the achievements of years in the world of work, were fired in a much higher proportion than men, and the entire burden of caring for children, the elderly, and basic running of the home fell on them. Many were forced to retire from hard-won jobs.

9. Weak health financing in many Latin American countries meant that heroic doctors and nurses had limited protection, and had a disproportionate incidence of infections.

10. The most successful countries were the most egalitarian, such as the Nordics, New Zealand, and several Europeans.

Confronting future pandemic viruses and ending this one, according to the WHO, one person continues to die every four minutes from coronavirus, will require learning in depth from all the errors and shortcomings mentioned, and others that can be added, and defending the right to health at all costs.