Chris Beyer:
Yeah yeah. Well, I lost my first partner to HIV before there was any treatment. He was a wonderful man who died at the age of 31 from Kaposi’s sarcoma, which was very incurable at the time. And I was a resident at Johns Hopkins when he passed away. So, yes, intensely personal for me. Now over the past few months we have lost I have lost two close colleagues who were leading HIV doctors, infectious disease managers in Zimbabwe who treated covid patients and of course did not have access to vaccines. So that’s the reality.
You know that more than a thousand doctors are said to have already died in India, a country where, you know, these people are rare compared to richer countries. And of course, every loss is a human loss. But the losses of these suppliers, of course, also have implications for everyone else. So, yeah, that’s that’s I think many feel now that the pandemic is rising here and it’s continuing in so many other countries, the urgency that we feel we need to do better with the global access to the COVID vaccine. And I would just add that this PEPFAR infrastructure that we owe to George Bush in Congress who supported it and to the last four presidential administrations, including the Biden administration, this infrastructure can be leveraged in Africa and Asia for vaccination against the COVID. And I think it really should be. I think that’s really important. And we have people, we have nurses, we have outreach workers, we have drivers for all kinds of people who work for this program, providing treatment and HIV prevention programs. And they could also work on COVID. So I think that’s something that I hope we’ll see soon.
