WHO’s top scientists suffering from HIV say the world has to do better with COVID

Twenty years ago, Soumya Swaminathan saw HIV-infected patients often suffering horrific and unnecessary deaths. There was a cure for their illness, but they simply couldn’t afford it.

World Health Organization Chief Scientist told AFP that today’s inequality in access to the COVID-19 vaccine helped watch the decline of HIV patients in India while the drug was saving lives in the West. He said it reminds me of the late 1990s.

Effective treatments for HIV, first created in the mid-1990s, were very expensive, exceeding $ 10,000 per patient per year.

It will take almost 10 years before they become available to the poorer.

“I was seeing the patient I was seeing dying … I had a terrifying long-term death when treatments were already available in the west,” Swaminasan said in a recent interview.

“I lost so many patients and the children were orphaned. Those images still bother me.”

“Morally and ethically wrong”

Today, Indian pediatricians and clinical scientists, one of WHO’s top executives leading the global effort to coordinate pandemic responses, said they were disappointed that the world is making mistakes in the past. Stated.

“You need to learn from history, but we don’t think so,” she said.

To date, only 0.3% of the dose of COVID vaccine has been administered worldwide. The poorest countries, Almost 10 percent live World population..

“It’s very difficult to witness it, and it’s morally and ethically wrong,” Swaminasan said.

Obvious heterogeneity in access to vaccines comes despite coordinated efforts to address historical inequality.

WHO and others have created Covax, a global vaccine sharing program, but they are facing a serious shortage of funds and a serious supply shortage, delaying efforts to deploy vaccines in poor countries. ..

Still, Swaminasan said he believes Covax is slowly changing and hopes it will eventually become a “success story.”

Meanwhile, persistent inequality was even more frustrating as Swaminasan and her team fought to understand COVID-19 and provide the information needed to curb it.

“very difficult”

The 62-year-old admitted that the first few months of the pandemic were “extremely difficult.”

As a WHO Principal Investigator, she said she felt a “great sense of responsibility.”

In addition, Swaminasan, who moved to Geneva for work and left behind her husband, grown-up children, and the rest of India’s current endangered pandemic, has personal tensions. There is.

“Deep in your heart, you are worried about your family,” she said, adding that she was particularly interested in the well-being of her older parents.

The father of the famous geneticist MS Swaminasan, known for his role in leading the Green Revolution in India, is 95 years old, and the mother of the famous educator Minaswaminasan is 88 years old.

Swaminasan usually starts before 7am and works late into the night. Balance of work and life“To avoid burnout.

“The world isn’t doing enough”

A long daily walk through the lush, pristine greenery near her home outside Geneva is part of her daily routine.

“Nature was therapeutic to me,” she said.

The therapy was welcomed as her team kept up with and communicated the ever-evolving science around COVID-19.

“As they say, we were building and sailing ships, and it’s always stressful,” she said.

“Especially when I look at images of affected people, dead health care workers, my own colleagues, and my classmates I lost all over the world, there are days when I feel terribly depressed, sad and upset. “She admitted. “”

According to Swaminasan, one of the biggest complaints was the constant backlash from the massive “anti-scientific movement.”

“There are people who deliberately instill conspiracy theories, not just skeptics,” she said.

She added that it is difficult to combat false information while striving to provide science-backed guidance on the virus and its spread.

“We didn’t always get it right in the first place,” Swaminasan said. “Unfortunately, when dealing with a new virus or a new epidemic, we don’t know everything on the first day.

“But that’s how science evolves.”

Regarding what we learned from the pandemic, Swaminasan said the biggest lesson was the need to ensure equal access to life-saving vaccines and drugs.

“We need to deal with this,” she said. “The world is clearly not doing enough.”

© 2021 AFP