Jasper Colt, USA Today

We may be in a place where for some of us, life seems to have partially returned to normal.  But we still have a long way to go. As anticipated, distribution of vaccines across the world is proving to be complex. Not surprisingly, women are at the forefront of this acutely vital operation, leading the way and not allowing us to forget that the entire world must have the opportunity to be vaccinated.

This month we look at some amazing women who have made invaluable contributions to the fight against covid; from helping in the development of vaccines to assuring that all nations of the world are provided with the vaccines they need to return to a safe and secure society. We also see some women steering their efforts towards vaccine education in communities of color, like our featured woman we love Kizzmekia Corbett. After aiding in the development of the Moderna vaccine, she now works to demystify it amongst black communities where there has been vaccine hesitancy due to historic oppressive practices like the Tuskegee experiment. Her efforts are vital to aid in the vaccination of some of the most vulnerable populations. As is the work of other key women in this global fight for the end of the pandemic like Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala the former head of GAVI who worked to plan for an equitable distribution of the vaccine to countries who will not be able to afford to finance the entire vaccination process.

We highlight women on the frontlines of how we get to the end of this pandemic and also how we move towards our new post Covid world reality. Get to know the women at the forefront of Global health, because as the ONE campaign (featured) says, if the vaccine isn’t everywhere, this pandemic isn’t going anywhere. Women in this field seem to get that. Let's follow their lead and navigate a new tomorrow that gives everyone a fair chance to live in a Covid Free world.

People all over the world are standing in solidarity with each other to fight coronavirus, but the virus keeps moving fast.

The pandemic will inevitably wreak its worst on the communities and countries that are least able to withstand the shock. Let’s stand with the most vulnerable whether they live across the street or across the ocean.

We are one world and it’s time to fight for humanity against the virus. Sign our petition telling governments that a global pandemic demands a global response.

The fastest way to end the COVID-19 pandemic is to ensure vaccines are available to everyone, everywhere. But, people living in the world’s poorest countries are being left behind. That’s why The ONE Campaign released a new animated series called “Pandemica” to raise awareness about the need for global vaccine access. Because if the vaccine isn’t everywhere, this pandemic isn’t going anywhere.

Watch Pandemica and join our fight to end the pandemic for everyone, everywhere.

"The past few months have been intense, but it has united the world. It’s simply about humanity and this resonates across the human race. In the face of a common enemy, artificial structures erected to differentiate us — race, color, culture — have become insignificant."

Gloria Odigwe - Nigeria

"My mother is a nurse, she’s 65 and I’m afraid of her catching COVID-19. She goes to work so she can help others. Although I’m afraid my mother might get ill, I’m so proud of the work she is doing and how she worries about those in need. If we all do our parts, we’ll get through this."

Leonor Calaça - United Kingdom

"In Vancouver at 7pm, some of the hospitals have a shift change. A huge movement has started where people have been standing on their balconies and banging pots and pans, cheering, clapping, holding signs, blowing horns, to cheer on these incredible personnel."

Trina Ferguson - Canada

 Timothy Nwachukwu/NYT/Redux/eyevine

Immunologist Kizzmekia Corbett helped to design the Moderna vaccine. Now she volunteers her time talking about vaccine science with people of color.

Even before Corbett took on one of the most challenging tasks of her professional career, she was a force to be reckoned with. As a student,she was selected to participate in Project SEED, a program for gifted minority students that allowed her to study chemistry in labs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and eventually landed a full ride to the University of Maryland Baltimore County, according to The Washington Post.

Corbett spent her summers at laboratories and earned a summer internship at the NIH, the very place where she would be instrumental in developing a vaccine for the coronavirus.

After graduating, Corbett enrolled in a doctorate program at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she worked as a research assistant studying virus infections and eventually received a PhD in microbiology and immunology.

Her work with such pathogens began when she joined the NIH's Vaccine Research Center as a postdoctoral fellow in 2014.

Corbett is taking on another challenge: tempering vaccine hesitancy by talking about COVID-19 science in communities of color.

Corbett is one of many Black scientists and doctors who are doing this outreach, often virtually, in their free time. Researchers say it’s necessary to make scientific knowledge accessible in public forums, to ease health disparities.

In the United States, COVID-19 has affected Black, Native American and Latino American people at higher rates than white people, for reasons rooted in racism and historical segregation. At the same time, people in these groups are more wary of COVID-19 vaccines. In a December survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 46% of Black adults said they probably would not get vaccinated against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, compared with 30% of white respondents. Those who were hesitant cited worries about side effects, and the speed at which the vaccines were developed. A legacy of exploitative medical research, such as infamous syphilis studies in Tuskegee, Alabama — in which doctors withheld treatment from hundreds of Black men from the 1930s and 1970s — contributes to this scepticism.

 PETE MAROVICH NYT. President Joe Biden bumps elbows with Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett as Anthony Fauci looks on as they visit the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.

Nature spoke to Corbett between appointments in her packed schedule, which included beaming into virtual events at churches and community gatherings to talk about vaccine science, attending NIH group meetings and tweeting about virus biology and vaccine misinformation as @KizzyPhD.

What was your role in designing a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, and what was that like?

My contribution was helping to design the vaccine, leading the preclinical studies that informed the Phase I clinical trial and designing assays used for testing of clinical trial samples.

The quest in early January 2020 was to gear up. We started ordering all the things that we needed around animal experiments. We mapped out a plan. I started assigning roles to team members.

If you want to go fast in a pandemic, then messenger RNA (mRNA) is a shoo-in. It can be manufactured very quickly in very vast quantities, and it’s plug and play in that you can essentially just swap out the protein once you have the system down. We collaborated with Moderna so we could get the system down pat.

You began giving science talks to the public at age 20. What did you talk about?

I would do it really around the thing that the people need to know. Girl Scouts need to know about puberty and sexually transmitted diseases and sex. And churches often need to have something scientifically broken down for them by someone who also believes in God. It’s not about what you’re saying, it’s about how you relate to the people you’re saying it to.

During the pandemic, you’ve spoken at many events, often with communities of colour. What are some ways you build trust?

Always invite questions at the end. Scientists are notorious for running over time. If you short people on their questions, you lose all the trust you just gained, because it looks like you’re avoiding them. I generally try to double my question time.

My role is to deliver science in a digestible fashion. When I present a bar chart, I say, “This is the axis, and this is what you’re seeing, and this is how it was tested.” So, the goal is that eventually people see enough of this, and we get to a point where we don’t have to do that any more.
 

What worries people most about COVID-19 vaccines?

Speed is the biggest thing. I think the technology being new is another. There are questions around the safety of the technology, particularly in the long term. There are questions about DNA, and fertility, and also whatever is on social media that day. Yesterday, there was a story where a Black woman unfortunately passed away after getting her COVID-19 vaccine. Whatever is happening on social media is what people are going to be concerned about.

Gavi has already protected an entire generation of children, and is now working to protect the next generation.

By improving access to new and under-used vaccines for millions of the most vulnerable children, the Vaccine Alliance is transforming the lives of individuals, helping to boost the economies of lower-income countries and making the world safer for everyone.

The Power of Partnership

Gavi’s impact draws on the strengths of its core partners, the World Health Organization, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and plays a critical role in strengthening primary health care (PHC), bringing us closer to the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) of Universal Health Coverage (UHC), ensuring that no one is left behind.

Gavi also works with donors, including sovereign governments, private sector foundations and corporate partners; NGOs, advocacy groups, professional and community associations, faith-based organisations and academia; vaccine manufacturers, including those in emerging markets; research and technical health institutes; and implementing country governments.

The COVAX AMC’s role is to leverage the scale assured by the participation of higher-income economies to ensure that lower-income ones are also able to participate.

The Facility will fund volume guarantees to specific manufacturers for vaccine candidates before they are licensed, as well as provide market-wide demand guarantees to all manufacturers in the longer term. Once vaccines are licensed and prequalified by the World Health Organization, COVAX AMC funds will then pay for the purchase of doses for all 92 ODA-eligible countries.

Such guarantees are designed to incentivise manufacturers to ensure that enough doses are produced for COVAX AMC economies, which collectively represent almost half the world’s population. To make this possible, Gavi and partners will continue to mobilise resources from donor governments, philanthropy and the private sector. This will largely go towards advance purchase agreements with manufacturers, to secure supply agreements for COVAX AMC doses.

COVAX Facility

With more than 180 countries and economies now involved in the COVAX Facility, the world recognises that our best hope of ending the acute phase of this pandemic and the only truly global solution is COVAX. It is also the only way to ensure that people in all countries get rapid, fair and equitable access once safe and effective vaccines become licensed. It also is trying to maximise the probability of success by having the largest and most diverse portfolio of COVID-19 vaccine candidates. The Gavi COVAX Advance Market Commitment(COVAX AMC) is an essential part of making this happen because it is through this innovative financial mechanism that the world’s poorest countries will get access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Right now, to get to that point, COVAX is working with pharmaceutical partners to have manufacturing in place so that doses can be procured and produced at scale as soon as vaccines receive regulatory approval and are licensed. The initial aim is to have 2 billion doses available by the end of 2021 – half of which will go to lower-income countries – which should be enough to protect high-risk and vulnerable people, including frontline health and social care workers, across the world.

REUTERS/Benoit Tessier

While there is still a long way to go for women in global health to get the recognition, respect and relative conditions they deserve – at all levels and in all places – there are some notable breakthroughs. The world might be living the movie Contagion at present, but there is a serious flaw in the metaphor. The movie ends with a scientist using herself as a one sample test to show viability of a vaccine – while a male actor is making the policy and disbursement decisions. For some of us, identification of a potential vaccine is where it all begins. And as for distributing it, it isn’t one man calling the shots.

To get vaccines developed, financed, regulated, manufactured, allocated, contracted, purchased and delivered – while hastily retrofitting a network of supply chain webbing around the world – is a phenomenal undertaking. It may be the biggest logistical effort to get a commodity made, scaled-up and distributed to every country, the world has ever seen.

And guess what? Much of this global health security effort is being run by women. The global initiative for this is COVAX, and for the design, development and initial operational phase, the forces to be reckoned with and women in charge, were the Chair of the Gavi Alliance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Chair of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, Jane Halton. Dr Okonjo-Iweala has moved on to head up the World Trade Organization now, but you can bet she will continue a keen interest in vaccine equity. 

 Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala

Gavi and The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) work in conjunction with the World Health Organization (WHO), where the leader of their effort is Chief Scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan. While Gavi and CEPI both have visionary, driven and fantastic male CEOs (Dr Seth Berkley and Dr Richard Hatchett), the Managing Director of the COVAX Facility which is doing the deals, setting up the conditions and bringing together the 186 countries, territories and other assorted participants to make it all happen, is Aurélia Nguyen who has just been listed one of 100 to watch by Time Magazine.

Several billion dollars will pass through Gavi for the COVID-19 vaccine effort and the responsibility sits with Marie-Ange Saraka-Yao, while the accountability for these funds (and the $8 billion dollar Gavi 5.0 programme) in large part falls to Gavi’s Deputy CEO Anuradha Gupta and Managing Director of Finance and Operations, Assietou Diouf. Supporting the Gavi Chair in this undertaking is Vice Chair Sarah Goulding, who also leads the Governance Committee of the Gavi Board.
In CEPI, in charge of the research and development decisions for the nine vaccines to help accelerate them to market is Dr Melanie Saville. At the WHO, the Director of Vaccines and Biologics and on the frontline of the day-to-day COVAX effort covering the policy, regulatory and allocation aspects is Professor Kate O’Brien. She works for Assistant Director General Mariangela Simao who leads the Drugs Access, Vaccines and Pharmaceuticals division of WHO.

But wait, there’s more. Dozens of countries need immediate financial support, and the one who got this rolling was European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. The World Bank stepped in with $12 billion which, as Vice President of Human Development Mamta Murthi put it when her brief to the board was accepted, is, “To support the largest crisis response the world has ever seen.” 

To get vaccines to many countries, UNICEF’s big delivery machine will roll into place under the careful watch of Executive Director Henrietta Fore and Director of their Supply Division, Eva Kadilli. The purchasing effort for Latin America is fronted by Dr Carissa Etienne, the Director of the Pan American Health Organisation, while the WHO Regional Director for Africa is Dr Matashido Moeti. Women are leading in the breakthrough research and scale up of vaccines as well, from BioNTech Professor Katalin Karikó’s visionary development of messenger RNA work to Professor Sarah Gilbert’s architecture of the Oxford Astra Zeneca vaccine.

You want to talk diversity? Bring it on. These extraordinary women are from countries like Nigeria, Australia, India, Vietnam, France, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, the UK, Brazil, Germany, the US, South Africa, Albania, Hungary and Dominica.

When this all settles down, and those of us in the thick of it get some headspace, maybe we need to write Contagion 2, starting where the first film left off. We can show how a just-in-time leadership wave met with a just-in-time planetary public health effort. But this time most of the leading roles will need go to women.

Women in Global Health

Join us in our Gender Equal Health & Care Workforce Initiative

The Government of France, the World Health Organization and Women in Global Health are partnering in 2021- the International Year of Health and Care Workers- on the Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative (GEHCWI). This Initiative aims to increase visibility, dialogue, and commitment to action on gender equity in the health and care workforce alongside the UN Women Generation Equality Campaign to accelerate gender equality and mark the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. ​

Gender equity in the health and care sector builds a strong foundation for health systems, universal health coverage (UHC) and global health security. The Gender Equal Health and Care Workforce Initiative (GEHCWI) will convene the international community to implement existing global commitments and agree on practical steps to achieve gender equity in the health and care workforce.​

The Initiative aims to drive action in the health and care sector under four pillars:

A MESSAGE FROM WOMEN IN GLOBAL HEALTH

The COVID-19 pandemic presents an unprecedented challenge to global institutions – not just health systems, but to our collective social, economic and political systems worldwide.

Put simply: Coronavirus will define our time and fundamentally reshape our world.

The current pandemic shines a harsh light on inequality and shows that ours is an interconnected global society. Viruses don’t respect national borders, and the rapid spread of COVID-19 is due in large part to the ways power and privilege play out in the provision of healthcare worldwide. Billions of people lack Universal Health Coverage (UHC) – some without access to any care at all – and their vulnerability leaves us all vulnerable.

Many in the extended Women in Global Health community are health workers fighting on the frontlines of this pandemic. Our chapters are sharing evidence, materials and learning throughout our robust network of passionate women committed to equitable and accessible health for all. As always, we are committed to supporting this knowledge-sharing and community- building and will continue to facilitate this with our network and partners.

But the current state of global health requires even more decisive action. That’s why we’re doubling down on our Operation 50/50 campaign, which demands equal representation for women in global health leadership because diverse perspectives strengthen health systems and save lives – and we can’t win the fight against this (and other) health challenges by using only half of our global talent pool. The voices of women, especially women from the Global South, must be heard.

Today, we launch four more calls to action to strengthen the global response to COVID-19 and prepare health systems for future pandemics:

• Provide health workers, most of whom are women, with safe and decent working conditions
• Recognize and value women’s work in health and social care by bringing women’s unpaid work into the formal labour market and redistributing unpaid family care equally between men and women
• Adopt a gender-sensitive approach to health security data collection/analysis and response management
• Fund women’s movements – especially women’s organizations in low- and middle-income countries – to unleash capacity to address critical gender issues.

Global and local solidarity are vital as this emergency escalates. Movements like ours, which work beyond borders, are key to confronting this global threat. As part of this emergency response, it is critical that women are enabled as decision-makers at all levels – from global to community.
Please join us in confronting the power and privilege that undermine global health by preventing women from contributing equally to the fight against challenges like this pandemic.
Support our Five Asks for Global Health Security.

- Dr. Roopa Dhatt Executive Director and Co-founder Women in Global Health

Stand With Breonna

Saturday. March 13th, 2021 marked one year since police killed Breonna Taylor during a botched raid. Her family and millions of others continue their demand for justice. 

Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.

The police officers have yet to be arrested or charged. Breonna's family saw no progress in their fight for justice, so they reached out to our team at the Action PAC. We need all hands on deck!!!

Add your name: We’re calling on the Louisville Metro Police Department to terminate the police involved, and for a special prosecutor to be appointed to bring forward charges against the officers and oversee all parts of this case. We’re demanding that the Louisville Metro Council pass new rules banning the use of no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna’s home.

Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, and all charges have been dropped against Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, but our work is not done.