Sangeeta Shashikant (London) – Access by affected countries to Ebola treatments is at a “standstill”, more than two years since their approval and five outbreaks of Ebola virus disease (EVD) later.
This was exposed by MSF Access Campaign in its recently launched report titled “Ensuring Access to New Treatments for Ebola Virus Disease”.
Decisions concerning availability and affordability are left to the goodwill of corporations and rich countries, despite research and development (R&D) of the treatments only made possible with public funding and collaborative effort, the report states.
It further reveals that the U.S. government has set up its own emergency stockpile of Ebola virus disease (EVD) treatments which contains nearly all currently available treatments, deploring that “these treatments have not been adequately rolled out as lifesaving public health tools for people in countries where outbreaks occur and are instead retained primarily as biosecurity tools”. The European Union (EU) and other actors, also appear interested in setting up stockpiles as part of their pandemic preparedness efforts, the report adds.
The inequity narrated by the MSF report is now a recurring occurrence during a health emergency resulting in unnecessary suffering and deaths in developing countries. In 2005, developing countries, especially South-East Asian countries hardest hit by the H5N1 outbreaks, failed to get access to vaccines developed using the flu strains circulating in affected countries, as supplies to rich countries were prioritized by manufacturers.