By: Colette Weese and Roos van der Velde
Topics addressed, in order:
- Moving from a scientific approach to a rights-based, health advocacy approach
- Beginning to incorporate a decolonization approach to global health work
- The importance of global south leadership, global north allyship
- What allyship could mean for institutions in the Global North
- Institutional resistance to equity-strengthening changes and contending with resistance
- Success stories of equity building in global health
- Approaches to communicating about decolonization
- Final thoughts and wake up calls for global health
Introduction
On December 17, 2024, we spoke with Dr. Shashika Bandara about his ongoing work on building equity in the field of Global Health. We asked him what critical allyship can look like for Global Health professionals and institutions based in high-income countries (HICs), and about institutional resistance to change and important steps towards collective progress.
Dr. Bandara was raised in Sri Lanka, and moved to the United States for his post-secondary education, where he completed his Bachelor’s degrees in biology and English. After completing his initial research work in molecular biology at Johns Hopkins University, he decided against a career focusing on molecular biology. Instead, he returned to Sri Lanka and worked in human rights and the humanitarian sector. In human rights, he largely focused on policy advocacy in economic, social and cultural rights with the Law and Society Trust, Sri Lanka [link to their website here]. In humanitarian work, he worked with communities affected by war and natural disasters with CARE International. Building on his science, policy and human rights experiences, he completed a Master’s degree at Duke University before working at the Duke Global Health Institute, where he focused on global health policy. Dr. Bandara completed his PhD at McGill University, Canada focusing on global health policy and governance, examining the global health treaty, Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. He continues at McGill, contributing to research on structural discrimination and global health, and re-imagining global health governance. In collaboration and under the mentorship of Dr. Madhukar Pai, he co-leads (with Dr. Ananya Banerjee) research examining policy exemplars addressing structural discrimination. This work is conducted in partnership with the Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health [read about the Commission here]. Overall, Dr. Bandara’s work focuses on strengthening global health equity, improving global health governance and strengthening human rights within global health.
Read our conversation with Dr. Bandara below. Note that responses have been edited for clarity, not for content.
Colette Weese (CW): At what point in your education and work did you realize that you wanted to shift towards more of a human rights or global health advocacy position? Was there anything in particular that led you to that?
Dr. Shashika Bandara (SB): My initial leaning was to go into a very laboratory-based, molecular biology pathway or to medical school. I actually did cancer immunology research at Johns Hopkins for about a year and realized that this was something I didn’t want to do. So, I said no to a PhD there and came back to Sri Lanka. But you also have to realize (because we don’t talk about these things often), that visa equity played a role in that decision [read his and other authors’ article about visa equity here]. So, at Hopkins, they considered my position too junior to be sponsored for a work visa, so I either had to try to be a PhD student or leave, and I chose to leave. It was a big decision at the time – I was quite young and scared – but when I came back to Sri Lanka, I intentionally got involved in human rights. I did a lot of policy work around economic, social and cultural rights in Colombo, targeting policy makers.
But a key point of inspiration for me was working with CARE International in post-conflict zones in Sri Lanka. In 2014, we were working with communities that were affected by the war (that had ended in 2009) who were also affected by natural disasters. I was inspired by the communities I met and how our team approached the work as well. So, looking at those communities and how those organizations [relief organizations, international NGOs] interacted with those communities made me realize that a lot of the time, the views of the communities or even the workers on the ground are not heard. CARE International was leaving Sri Lanka in 2016 but many felt that there was more work to be done. So, I helped the team create a memorandum of understanding (MoU) that allowed some kind of continuity and pathways to support in case of a large-scale emergency. That experience really fashioned my ideas of the necessity for strengthening equity, the necessity for listening to low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Of course, I didn’t have the language at the time, and I don’t think global health was using the word “decolonize” at the time, as commonly. But based on the experiences of myself and others, I increasingly felt the need for equity. So, my goal in even doing my Master’s was to be a voice in places and institutions that would not necessarily consider these types of ideas. I’m fortunate to have found the community in Global Health who thinks the same way, because I think sometimes people go through their whole career struggling against the system without finding equity-focused people. That was my foray into global health equity and human rights.
CW: How would you describe the process of acquainting yourself with the topic of decolonization? Or, when did you start to realize that you wanted to work with decolonization, and that it could be an important contributor to the work you were doing?
SB: I think decolonization has been progressively gaining momentum in global health before I came across it as a concept. For me, the motivation stemmed from my lived experience of growing up in an LMIC and the lessons learned in my career, where I recognized the inequity between how organizations work with LMICs, how global health funding happens, and so on. As I delved more into global health, I recognized how we don’t necessarily talk about inequities, and how the field is still dominated by this very Global North centric model that doesn’t ultimately genuinely collaborate with the Global South. After I graduated and was a researcher at Duke Global Health Institute (DGHI), there was this very courageous group of students (Yadurshini Raveendran, Laura Mukumba and Andrea Koris) who came together to organize a Decolonizing Global Health conference. I think the beginnings of these student movements can be traced back to South Africa. Then Harvard University organized a Decolonizing Global Health Conference, then Duke University organized one in 2018. This is when I really got exposed to the framing around decolonizing Global Health, and the necessity for it.
The two speakers who really stood out to me were Seye Abimbola, the previous editor-in-chief of BMJ Global Health and an Associate Professor at University of Sydney, and Dr. Madukhar Pai, the current Chair of the Department of Global and Public Health at McGill. I also saw the struggle these students went through to make the conference happen because they also faced resistance. And some professors at Duke University, such as Dr. Gavin Yamey, who were really strong allies, stepped in and supported them.
The other key turning point when I was at DGHI was George Floyd’s murder in the US. There were calls for them to reform the way universities approach anti-racism and so on. And not just the global health institute – but the wider medical school was also being called on to introspect. So, I helped form and co-led an equity task force at the Duke Global Health Institute, where we got faculty and students together as working groups. Using our work, we released a recommendations report. I left Duke before the release of the report, but the team took the project forward, which is great. Based on these experiences, I wrote an article on “How to prevent equity efforts from losing steam in global health academia” [read it here]. And I have been learning, advocating and writing on building equity in global health. These efforts include trying to learn more and apply this decolonial approach. As a doctoral student, I did a lot of advocacy around vaccine equity. This included meeting with the Prime Minister’s office in Canada and advocating for allocating budget funding for the COVAX initiative and pushing for vaccine equity during the pandemic through my writing and more.
Our recent piece, which is about leadership in the Global South and allyship in the Global North, was influenced by all these experiences [read it here].
So, if you’re a person entering Global Health, you first see the superficial version of it, which is the HICs helping out LMICs to address their challenges. But if you just dig a little deeper, you realize how colonization has contributed to those challenges and how global health itself is rooted in colonization. This includes fields like malaria research and the beginning of many of these tropical medicine institutions. And then you look at the current systems, and the current inequalities that you’re faced with – and see the colonial influence. There was one panel, I can’t remember who said this, but there was a question around neglected tropical diseases. This person asked the panel, “have you ever considered why they are neglected? Who is neglecting them?” Those are the questions that we haven’t really asked enough. The more you dig, the more you recognize the systemic challenges that are rooted in colonialism and neocolonialism. Once you see it, it’s like glass breaking and you can’t see it any other way, because that’s the reality.
CW: I want to move now into some of the concepts in the article that you recently published, about Global South leadership and Global North allyship. Can you elaborate on why it’s so crucial to focus on transferring leadership to the Global South?
SB: I don’t think the call is to transfer leadership. The call is to build an equitable Global Health infrastructure. There’s a research organization called Global Health 50-50 which released a report called Boards for All [read the report here and Dr. Bandara and others’ article related to the report here]. They looked at representation of low income countries, middle income countries, and high income countries, then men, women, women who are minorities, and so on with many different categories. The analysis found that boards are disproportionately dominated by HIC individuals and especially by white men. This translates into decisions that we see being made today, and those decisions reflect the wider political context and the current status quo of Global Health in many countries. For example, the nexus between pharmaceutical industries and HICs, when they blocked the TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines and other products. [read about the TRIPS waiver here and here].
And if you look at wars, for example, the current conflict in Gaza, the U.S. has been blocking humanitarian aid with a single veto [in the UN Security Council] for a long time. I have never seen humanitarian and UN organizations united in advocating for humanitarian aid with such force, but a few powerful countries are holding back humanitarian aid. And beyond that, there is the dehumanization of people, including war affected civilians and refugees and more. These are all global health problems. Just to give you an idea, early on after the October 7th attack by Hamas, when Israel in their retaliation indiscriminately attacked health care and civilians in Gaza, the chair of Global Public Health at Edinburgh University, Dr. Devi Sridhar, wrote a piece in The Guardian about how the next stage would be infectious diseases caused by lack of water and hygiene [read the article here]. Everybody saw it coming, everybody read the piece, but we were largely silent and without meaningful action. Why? Because the current geopolitical system favors a status quo that often does not genuinely consider the lives of those in low and middle income countries as important, whether it’s vaccine equity, whether it’s wars, whether it’s other inequities that we see today.
Part of the problem is also the lack of opportunity for those from LMICs to speak about global health challenges in LMICs and share their expertise related to handling those challenges. Lack of access for global health professionals from LMICs to speak at conferences or meetings due to visa and passport inequity is a big problem. So, if LMICs are experts at, let’s say, handling the dengue disease, then they should present at many of these tropical medicine conferences. But if the tropical medicine conference is going to be held in somewhere like America, many of them will not be able to get visas. So, there’s a lack of representation in academic and other conferences where people could showcase their work, shine the spotlight on challenges, be recognized as experts, and have the opportunity to contribute to global decision-making spaces. Visa inequity and the locations of where conferences are being held is a big challenge and another reason why we need to shift the status quo.
The second main thing is funding structures. In any situation, global funding structures influence the work that an organization does. So, when the field is dominated by Global North-led funding structures, the priorities and limitations that come with the funding represent the viewpoints of Global North institutions. Often, Global South institutions are asked to partner up with Global North institutions and Global North institutions retain a lot of the funding power. That is something that a lot of people have spoken about and which needs to shift.
In addition to considering how the agenda setting is affected by the funding structures, we also need to consider how much money actually goes into the countries that work on the research or addressing policy problems at hand. More and more, especially in North American universities, there is reliance on soft money, which refers to short term funding that can run out; the funding is not secure in the long term. As a result, a lot of new faculty are expected to bring money with them to fund their work. That puts a lot of pressure on how they can work and what they can speak on. So, if your university or funder doesn’t like this equity lens you’re taking, which a lot of them don’t and can depend on the political climate, then you face challenges and you may be asked to tone down your voice. All of these things are important to consider and put a big barrier on shifting the thinking. We want to shift the thinking from a colonial or neocolonial model to one that is more equity-focused and considers everybody’s viewpoints. This requires some type of sacrifices and changes the existing systems will not like. But, if you are dependent on those systems for funding, then you’re scared to even allow your employees, researchers, professors to speak out on equity or change. Professors, students, and others like myself are affected by these institutional barriers at the university level and in global health governance systems at large.
These are things that we have outlined in the article as problems with the status quo. All of this needs to shift, and we believe that a lot of that shift cannot happen if the Global North is leading. We cannot continue to dismantle a system while depending on the same system. So, this is where there is the opportunity and necessity for the Global South to lead and shift away from the inequities that Global Health was grounded upon.
CW: As a follow-up to that, how do you see the role of allyship, from the perspective of an institution or professional in the Global North? How would you lay out some key points of what critical allyship could look like in this shift?
SB: I think I’ll start at the personal level, like what you guys at [Decolonizing Global Health] are doing right now. Step one is recognizing that there’s a problem. There are still professors who do not. When we run these courses on decolonizing Global Health, some write to us and say that the way we look at Global Health is very pessimistic, that Global Health does a lot of good, and that the way we look at it isn’t helpful and we’re overly dramatic and so on. But what [Decolonizing Global Health] is doing is exceptionally important because it is holding a mirror to ourselves, and saying, “Look, these institutions, while they may have good mission statements and intentions, come from a system that is problematic and perpetuates these problems. So let’s examine that and see how we can do better.” So that’s step one, and it happens at a personal level.
There is personal introspection and then there is introspection at an institutional level. Institutes should ask, “How can we do better to support equity? How can we not continue harmful ways of practicing Global Health?” For example, if you’re an institution that promotes short-term medical trips to LMICs to give experiences to your students, then you need to reconsider that and ask, “How can we build a sustainable relationship that these countries actually benefit from? And how can we respect the system and the standards that they have?” That’s one way of doing this.
Critical allyship comes in through all of these other things that we have talked about. Funding organizations also need to consider their role, for example, if they give out a grant that says there must be equal partnership with LMIC settings. Now, journals are starting to require authorship from the countries that articles are speaking about. All of those best practices can snowball and improve and build voices from the Global South, and then create what we should have done a long time ago to have an equitable Global Health.
If you’re teaching Global Health, it’s really important to invite experts from LMICs or relevant communities, and not just for free. Bring them to teach your courses, bring them to give talks, but also provide remuneration. A lot of the times when experts from HICs are invited, they get paid, they get the royal treatment, but LMIC experts often don’t get that. We need to be very cognisant of the time that LMIC experts spend and give them the platform/payment accordingly. In the piece we wrote, we have highlighted a bunch of stakeholder groups, and one of them is academic institutions. We talk about reducing fees for trainees of LMICs and offering scholarships as a way of building allyship. We also talk about equitable bidirectional partnerships, reciprocity in terms of hosting trainees and experts from LMICs. Then, there is giving importance to allyship and trust-building efforts as part of the career advancement criteria for promotion and tenure. I would even include communications around these things, like talking about equity, as part of these criteria. Because a lot of people who do speak up can get punished for doing so. These are some of the things that Global North institutions can do.
CW: My last question on this particular point has to do with institutional resistance. You’ve already said that you and others encounter resistance when discussing and trying to make changes for an equitable Global Health system, and part of those changes mean Global North institutions relinquishing some decision-making and funding power. My question is, what does institutional resistance look like, and how do you contend with it?
SB: There’s definitely institutional resistance against equity. You see this at the global level.
Before coming to academic institutions, let’s look at national governments. Let’s take the TRIPS waiver for an example. I don’t think any of the reasons given were reasonable enough to allow poor access to COVID vaccines and treatment. Many health justice initiatives have all called out this duplicity from countries who align with pharmaceutical companies. It is a problem that is rooted in global governance.
When it comes down to institutions – which are affected by funding structures that are affected by global governance – the resistance you encounter can take many forms. Sometimes it could take the form of “don’t speak about these topics or else.” The institution or its actors will put a red line on a topic and say, “if you do speak about this, here are the ways that it can affect you.” Obviously then a lot of self-censorship happens, and students and faculty get scared to speak about allyship, or equity or anti-racism, or any of the big Global Health challenges that are based on equity challenges. On the other hand, the institution may hire one person to do equity work, put all the burden on that person, not give them enough money and support, and then that person will break down under pressure and resign. This practice has been called out by many. Tricky Grounds by Candace Brunette-Debassige is a good book to read on this. This is institutional oppression that is not really seen on the surface. Because the institution will be outwardly really nice, but the actual pressure on many of these equity leaders can be overwhelming and people burn out. There is a necessity for institutions to put their money where their mouth is, to follow up on statements with funding, with support, with concerted teambuilding and so on.
The other resistance is mainly the inability to recognize that the status quo needs to shift. So, if you’re dependent on a system that is old and outdated, but it still gives you money and you don’t want to risk losing that, then you lack the courage to challenge that structure. There are those who have challenged, and Dr. Pai is a great example of a person who challenges the system creatively. There are universities and institutions that have done things that are exemplary. For example, I think McMaster University has a scholarship for scholars who are affected by war. These are little things that matter a lot. It matters to intentionally direct money to build equity, to build understanding of the importance of equity. But institutional resistance happens in so many ways: not giving funding, not hearing people when they talk about challenges, or actively telling people not to think about equity challenges are quite problematic. The University of British Columbia is in the spotlight for firing a faculty member for speaking out on Palestine, but that’s an extreme example. A lot of the time, let’s say someone who talks about vaccine equity, or inequalities, or lack of attention to colonialism in their own Global Health curriculum, could face internal challenges.
I think the biggest challenge for institutions and people is giving up power. So, if you recognize that the panel you’re speaking on, or the board you’re on, or the leadership team you’re on, does not have the proper representation for the topic you’re working on, you can say as a member, “I would give up this power so that someone from that community can come and contribute to the decisions.” That’s a huge sort of status quo shift that you yourself will have to sacrifice your space for. These are things you can change, and if [lack of proper representation in panels and decision-making spaces] is still happening at your institution, you should call it out. Even if it’s just on a general Global Health topic, diversity of gender, race, nationality, etc. is important and should be there in the panel and leadership board. A lot of the time, people without lived experience cannot speak to a challenge in the way that someone with lived experience would speak. So, the way that I have encountered visa inequity challenges and racism and the way I speak to it will be different from someone who grew up privileged in those aspects.
[Sharing platforms] is a big way of resisting because we have come to a world where we see everything in binary, like people are good or evil, and that’s not the case – sometimes people are unaware. So when you give these platforms, people see and hear about inequities and the need to build equity, to give more space to LMICs, and then they will start thinking differently. Giving the platform to someone else is really important, and it’s not a charity model. I want to stress that, it’s because they have earned that spot. They are experts, it’s just that they have been shut down by the system. So it’s our duty, if you have the platform, to give that back.
CW: The last thing I want to ask before our time is up, is if there are any really innovative initiatives or success stories that you want to highlight? Do you know of any projects taking place that are succeeding in building equity in the Global Health world?
SB: Yeah. There’s a working group among a few of us that looks at visa equity, and there are others who have looked at that issue before and have released toolkits on organizing conferences. There is the McMaster program and others which I included in a piece I wrote on visa equity [read the article here]. There is a Global Health Equity School in Rwanda [visit their website here], which is an example of an institution in the Global South that focuses on Global Health and does a lot of work on Global Health equity.
One thing that I do want to stress is the elite capture of Global Health. Even if you work in Global Health institutions in the Global South, sometimes those are dominated by the privileged in that country. That’s something that’s really important to recognize – that whether it’s language or money or social capital, there is a small group of people who dominate, and to counter that is also really important. So, asking, “Are you actually working towards the equity of all people? Are you representing the challenges that are affecting the population in the country and building equity in that sense?”
Summer Institute in Global Health led by Dr. Pai at McGill is making an effort to give space to LMIC students and speakers. It also has a tiered fee structure and waivers if necessary to facilitate participation regardless of where you are from. To counter the visa issues and other challenges, the Reimagining Global Health course at the Summer Institute is entirely online. Last year [the first year of the course] the engagement by students was so impressive – personally speaking. Dr. Pai teaches his Fundamentals of Global Health course and gives the platform to a lot of diverse experts and young people to speak. These are some of the best practices I see at McGill that we can build on.
But I think more needs to be done. You know, the bigger the institution is, the older the institution is, sometimes it’s harder to change. It’s really important for institutes to catch up and support people who are committed to building equity. Otherwise, mission statements can sound nice, but the institutions don’t live up to them.
Roos Van der Velde: I think what we’ve noticed as a student group, in our earlier stages of our work and also through starting these conversations on decolonization with our peers and with the university, is that sometimes people struggle with the complexity of it all. There is also sometimes a certain negative connotation with the word “decolonization” that sometimes people tend to not want to get involved with. We were wondering what your approach has been in your communication around the topic of decolonization?
SB: I want to give you some context. I used to work in human rights in Sri lanka at a time when it was very contentious and [human rights advocates] had personal safety challenges. So the way I approach these problems is not necessarily how everyone else approaches them. You have to respect that people fear for their circumstance, their careers, people fear for how they’re perceived, for their safety, for their immigration status etc. Usually, in my case, if I believe that equity is important, I will speak out. But not everybody does it the way I would, and that’s okay. Allies are not made all the same way and you need to collaborate with each other. The biggest thing I would suggest based on my own experience is that kindness is really important. Because we are all mentally and emotionally exhausted around these challenges. Even when we don’t see the solution the same way, lead with kindness and have conversations with kindness. Kindness does not mean giving a pass for someone who is being inequitable, but you don’t have to be unkind when you hold people accountable. When you’re being kind, it does not mean you don’t say what you need to say to the person or the institution. Oftentimes, when you tell people, “This is how you’re being inequitable, this is how you’re violating rights,” or whatever it is, with evidence, kindness and empathy then there is a better response.
Finally, there is “naming and shaming”. If you have taken kinder approaches and they just shut you down, then of course you have to take other ways of dealing with it. One way is you call them out publicly or more firmly – usually I would take this approach with politicians and those in high level leadership positions. But that has to be weighed against questions of, “what are the other consequences of this approach? Is this the best approach to take? Is it effective?” Depending on the situation, do what’s best. In academia, I have found that building allyship with key professors who are like-minded helps a lot as opposed to trying to go against the whole system all the time by yourself, because you’re going to burn out. These systems are built to last and we are just people. We are vulnerable, right? We are emotionally affected. There is power in numbers, so work as a group, share the load, don’t try to do it all on your own.
CW: Thank you for that. Is there anything else you want to add that you feel is important that we haven’t touched on yet?
SB: I think the next four years are really important. With Trump’s election, we cannot keep lying to ourselves that it’s not going to affect global health negatively. So, sexual and reproductive health, right? The climate crisis, vaccines, and even funding for WHO and other organizations is under threat, one way or another. Recognizing that, we need to give ourselves a reality check and see how best we can organize, and how we can hold our institutions accountable in these conversations. There is a tendency towards institutions aligning with what is politically feasible. We must recognize that there is going to come a time when politics is not going to align with equity – and anti-racism, DEI work is going to be attacked. Being ready for building community, for telling our institutions to stand by us, these are things that we need to look into and be prepared for. And you know, like we just did in this conversation, connecting and building our communities step by step and relying on each other is really important.
Note: This interview was conducted on December 17. Since the time of this interview, President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the WHO and ordered CDC staff to cease all collaboration with the WHO. Read more here. The Trump administration has also issued an executive order banning language and programs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Read more here, here, and here. The administration has also shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which provided support for vaccination, HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment, and medical equipment and staffing, among other programs. Read more about the projected impact of the end of USAID and reactions from world leaders here and here. It is still unclear what actions will be long-lasting and what will be challenged or blocked in courts, but what is clear is this administration’s intention to remove the U.S. from international networks and restrict domestic programs related to health and climate protections.
Additional recommended reading and resources from Dr. Bandara:
Bandara, S., Baral, P., Joshi, A. et al. (2022). Open Letter to G7 and G20 leaders: resolve global crises to secure our future. Nat Med 28, 1974–1975. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01944-7
Banerjee, A.T. et al. ( 2023). Are we training our students to be white saviours in global health? The Lancet, Volume 402, Issue 10401, 520 – 521. DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(23)01629-X
Naidu, T. (2024) Epistemic disobedience–Undoing coloniality in global health research. PLOS Glob Public Health 4(4): e0003033. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0003033
Nakweya, G. (2024). “How Visa Rejections Are Stalling Africa’s Health Research.” Nature News, Nature Publishing Group. http://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-024-00349-7.
Seye Abimbola – The foreign gaze: authorship in academic global health: BMJ Global Health 2019;4:e002068. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjgh-2019-002068
Links from this article in the order they appear:
“Home – LST – Law & Society Trust.” LST, 5 Sept. 2024, lst.lk/.
Towards anti-racist policies and strategies to reduce poor health outcomes in racialised communities: introducing the O’Neill–Lancet Commission on Racism, Structural Discrimination, and Global Health Erondu, Ngozi A et al. The Lancet, Volume 401, Issue 10391, 1834 – 1836
Bandara S, Zeinali Z, Blandina (M, Ebrahimi OV, Essar MY, Senga J, et al. (2023) Imagining a future in global health without visa and passport inequities. PLOS Glob Public Health 3(8): e0002310. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0002310
Economic, Social and Cultural Rights | Ohchr, http://www.ohchr.org/en/human-rights/economic-social-cultural-rights. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.
Bandara S, Banerjee AT (2023) How to prevent equity efforts from losing steam in global health academia. PLOS Glob Public Health 3(3): e0001656. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0001656
Shifting power in global health will require leadership by the Global South and allyship by the Global North Pai, Madhukar et al. The Lancet, Volume 404, Issue 10464, 1711 – 1713
“Boards for All?” Global Health 50/50, 2022, globalhealth5050.org/2022-report/.
Health, PLOS Global Public. “Who Gets to Govern in Global Health?: The Prevailing Status Quo Threatens ‘Health for All.’” Speaking of Medicine and Health, 25 Nov. 2024, speakingofmedicine.plos.org/2022/03/30/who-gets-to-govern-in-global-health-the-prevailing-status-quo-threatens-health-for-all/.
Kohler J, Wong A, Tailor L. Improving Access to COVID-19 Vaccines: An Analysis of TRIPS Waiver Discourse among WTO Members, Civil Society Organizations, and Pharmaceutical Industry Stakeholders. Health Hum Rights. 2022 Dec;24(2):159-175. PMID: 36579316; PMCID: PMC9790937.
“World Trade Organization.” WTO, http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/pharmpatent_e.htm. Accessed 5 Feb. 2025.
Sridhar, Devi. “It’s Not Just Bullets and Bombs. I Have Never Seen Health Organisations as Worried as They Are about Disease in Gaza | Devi Sridhar.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 29 Dec. 2023, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/29/health-organisations-disease-gaza-population-outbreaks-conflict.
“University of Global Health Equity.” UGHE, 28 Nov. 2024, ughe.org/.
Stobbe, Mike. “CDC Ordered to Stop Working with Who Immediately, Upending Expectations of an Extended Withdrawal.” AP News, AP News, 28 Jan. 2025, apnews.com/article/cdc-who-trump-548cf18b1c409c7d22e17311ccdfe1f6.
Grantham-Philips, Wyatte. “Dei Work Will Continue, Even amid Today’s Wave of Attacks, Executive Says.” AP News, AP News, 3 Feb. 2025, apnews.com/article/dei-diversity-equity-inclusion-trump-edelman-14c7cbc7c3856e48d10dec62c0d174b1.
“Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” AP News, AP News, apnews.com/hub/diversity-equity-and-inclusion. Accessed 11 Feb. 2025.
Miller, Katrina, and Roni Caryn Rabin. “Ban on D.E.I. Language Sweeps through the Sciences.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 9 Feb. 2025, http://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/09/science/trump-dei-science.html.
Knickmeyer, Ellen. “Watchdog: Trump’s Dismantling of USAID Means Billions in Unspent Aid Now Lack Oversight.” PBS, Public Broadcasting Service, 11 Feb. 2025, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/watchdog-trumps-dismantling-of-usaid-means-billions-in-unspent-aid-now-lack-oversight. Kakissis, Joanna, et al. “How the Gutting of USAID Is Reverberating around the World: Worry, Despair, Praise.” NPR, NPR, 11 Feb. 2025, http://www.npr.org/sections/goats-and-soda/2025/02/11/g-s1-47661/trump-musk-usaid-ukraine-south-africa-mexico-colombia-india-afghanistan-hiv.
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