While the world has been preoccupied with COVID-19, deaths from non-communicable diseases (NCDs) continue to impact poor nations at an alarming rate. Each year around the world, more than 15 million people die from NCDs between the ages of 30 and 69, and 85% of these premature deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries.
In fact, more people die from cancer in Africa than from malaria. Yet, many of the latest cancer treatments have not yet reached lower income countries. While treatments for all of these conditions exist, the barriers that keep them from patients are persistent and complex.
Over the last two years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have learned that when you let go of ‘business as usual’ and rethink the norm, we achieve breakthroughs. We developed in just nine months a vaccine and a treatment in 18 months that would previously have taken many years, and then we manufactured and shipped more than three billion of those vaccines to nearly 180 countries and territories in just one year.
Now we need another breakthrough: to end the health inequities that exist between wealthy and poor nations...
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