Anand Grover Senior advocate, Supreme court of

Transcript:Anand Grover Senior advocate, Supreme court of:
Anand Grover Senior advocate, Supreme court of india Director, Lawyers Collective Former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health (2008-2014) Member global commission on drug policy Member unaids reference group on Hiv Adjunct professor, Georgetown law center Expert workshop on new developments in ensuring access to medicines, vaccines and other health products OHCHR Geneva 21 january 2025 Access to medicines and Vaccines The International Health Crisis The Crisis in Health Internationally We have had two major health crisis at the international level in the last 4 decades or so The HIV and the Covid Pandemics The Responses in both cases have been very different There are diverse parameters on which basis we can analyse the responses in the two pandemics. They include:- Who the communities which were affected; the actors in the response, their respective roles, How did the treatment come about and how accessible it was to those affected The initial response to HIV In 1981 when HIV hit the world, HIV, it was an unknown disease, wreaking havoc to the lives of those affected, first in the US and then all over the world It was a “disease of the wretched of earth” affecting gay men, sex workers, and drug users, all stigmatized and marginalized communities Because of that, the initial response was very negative towards the the affected communities, Until the advent of the triple combination therapy being HIV+ meant a certain death It was only in the mid-1990s that treatment came in the form of triple combination ARV therapy Gay men’s movement in the US forced Pharms to fast track drugs The treatment came about because the gay men’s movement in the US launched a valiant struggle to fight for the very survival of their members; not because Big pharma wanted to do something about HIV With their tactics of targeting Big pharma and the FDA, they were able to force the FDA to release experimental drugs for treatment earlier than they would have otherwise been approved in the market From being without any treatment or cure in the early 1980s, HIV became a became a treatable ailment in the mid 1990s Today we have an international target of getting rid of HIV/AIDS by 2030 Rights based approach with the involvement of community actors key Marginalized communities of sex workers, drugs users, gay men got fully involved. They became the front-line soldiers for the fight