For the past two years, President Cyril Ramaphosa has championed the call for a full TRIPS Waiver on all Covid-19 related health products. This agreement would enable Africa and countries in the global South to take meaningful control of the response to this pandemic and the next.
On 17 June 2022, in Geneva, countries rich and poor, including South Africa, betrayed his call and muddied his legacy, a slap in the face of hundreds of world leaders and millions of activists who stood by the President’s call since 2020.
They signed a bad deal in our name, not a waiver. A bad deal.
Thanks to a spectacular failure in leadership, South Africa has succumbed to the bullying of rich countries, aided and abetted by World Trade Organisation (WTO) director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
We now face a future where life-saving technologies and recipes to produce them will remain out of our reach, where equitable access to testing and treatments for disease will
— source news24.com | Yousuf Vawda, Fatima Hassan, Tian Johnson | 18 Jun 2022