Natalie Roberts

On 3rd and 4th February 2022, the CRASH organised a workshop aimed principally at the directors and operational managers of MSF Operational Centre Paris (OCP) to reflect on current debates, and to determine which elements of the discussion would be the most relevant to resolve to support the advancement of MSF OCP’s operational projects. Is access to medicines the same issue today as it was when MSF first became interested in the mid-1990s? Rather than just concentrating on the obstacles to accessing medicines, should the debate be broadened to encompass what are now called ‘health products’ or even further, towards access to care and thus largely structural problems of human resources, financing, or the absence of national health insurance policies?

This article was published on December 22nd, 2021 in the Journal of Humanitarian Affairs (Issue 3, Volume 3).
In this article, Natalie Roberts analyses the actions and positioning of MSF during the Ebola outbreak in Nord Kivu (Democratic Republic of Congo, 2018-2020).

On 3rd and 4th February 2022, the CRASH organised a workshop aimed at the leaders, operational managers and members of MSF France, to shed light on the current debates on access to medicines, and to determine together which issues are the most relevant to resolve. In preparation for this workshop, the CRASH asked experts external to MSF to explain their vision of today’s pharmaceutical industry system, with subjects that ranged from pre-development to distribution, and included patents and quality-related issues.

We can all agree that the emergence of Covid-19 vaccine is “an absolutely astonishing development”, but vaccines are unlikely to completely halt the spread of the virus, let alone eradicate it. Yet even without achieving herd immunity, the ability to vaccinate vulnerable people seems to be reducing hospitalizations and deaths from Covid-19. 

Within four months of the first notification of Ebola cases in August 2018, the Nord Kivu (and Ituri) Ebola epidemic had become the second-largest on record. Notwithstanding a rapid and massive mobilisation of resources, the outbreak continued beyond the most pessimistic predictions and the case fatality rate (the proportion of people with the infection who die from it) remained static at 66%. Despite numerous lesson-learning exercises following the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014–2016, and despite the development of new vaccines and treatments, after 3,444 cases and 2,264 deaths it is difficult to claim that outcomes are better this time around.

After a few months of respite the coronavirus epidemic has resumed its spread. With the second wave becoming a reality in many European countries, the Crash team decided to share some recent reading on the biomedical, political and social aspects of the pandemic in an attempt to shed some light on this tragic Season 2. As in previous editions, some articles are in English and some in French, and they are taken from both mainstream and specialist sources.

The benefit of the vaccine is only real in the context of a rational and comprehensive biomedical, social, political and economic response, adapted to the local assessment of the health crisis and its impacts.