Edna Bonhomme

A 2013 study found that ‘diseases of relevance to high-income countries were investigated in clinical trials seven to eight times more often than were diseases whose burden lies mainly in low-income and middle-income countries.’ The NEJM reported in 2009 that pharmaceutical companies were conducting more clinical trials in developing countries, yet ‘among the ongoing phase 3 clinical trials that we examined that were sponsored by US-based companies in developing countries, none were trials of diseases such as tuberculosis that disproportionately affect the populations of these countries.’ Of more than 1500 new drugs produced between 1975 and 2004, only 21 targeted malaria, tuberculosis and other neglected diseases that are most common in low-income countries.

On a chilly late November afternoon, 150 people gathered at Lübeck airport in Schleswig-Holstein to be injected with a substance they had been told would protect them from Covid-19. The unauthorised vaccine was developed by Dr Winfried Stöcker, who didn’t carry out proper clinical trials but did test it on himself. He also owns the airport.

When I was seven or so, my aunt Fifi would take my cousins, siblings and me to demonstrations outside the Immigration and Naturalisation Services building on 79th Street in Miami. We were protesting against the policy – introduced by his Republican predecessors but continued under Bill Clinton – of intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and imprisoning them in Guantánamo Bay. We stood with the other Haitians, clutching aunt Fifi with one hand and waving our other fists in the air, shouting and chanting in a mixture of English and Kreyòl: ‘Let the Haitians in!’