Can Global Health Regain a Human Rights Focus?

Expert Reactions

During the March 25 event, three global health researchers who were not part of the commission offered comments on the report. 

Parveen Parmar, M.D., director of academic programs for the Institute on Inequalities in Global Health at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, echoed the report’s emphasis that human rights should not be considered in isolation. She noted that implementing the report’s recommendations needs to be an interdisciplinary effort, involving “engagement with policymakers, economists and activists, and I think centrally, communities as well.”

“The language of human rights is so critically important, but I think we can do a better job of making it relevant and understandable to people from different communities,” Parmar said. 

Rajat Khosla, director of the United Nations University International Institute for Global Health, noted the impact of the “multiple intersecting crises” discussed in the report on populations that are already experiencing significant hardship, such as migrants displaced by conflict, racial discrimination or climate change. 

“The impact of these multiple intersecting crises on such populations is catastrophic,” Khosla said. He called the inability to hold those responsible for creating such conditions accountable a “failure of leadership,” underscoring the need for stronger international governance. 

Salim S. Abdool Karim, M.B. ,Ch.B.,  director of the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and a professor of global health at Columbia University, said the report “makes a very compelling case” that the health of all citizens is not reachable without a strong emphasis on human rights. He noted vaccine hoarding by rich countries during the COVID-19 pandemic as an illustration of how backsliding on the priority of human rights has worsened health disparities. 

“We saw how global greed created this unconscionable inequity in access to biological countermeasures such as diagnostics, vaccines and oxygen,” Karim said. “We failed as a global community to stand as one against a common enemy.”