The COVID-19 pandemic has caused immense loss of life, leading individuals and organizations to create initiatives addressing this reality affecting communities around the globe offering outlets for remembering the life of those who died and declaring, as underscored by the COVID Memorial: “Not forgotten. Not just a number.”

In Dec. 2020, the arrival of the Pfizer vaccine and the first administrations in the UK have sparked parallels with HIV/AIDS and disinformation has led people to confabulate conspiracy theories on why in 30 years there has been no vaccine for HIV and in a year, one is ready for Covid-19. While the scientific community explains why it is incorrect to propose a parallelism between the two viruses on this point, perhaps the two pandemics can enter into dialogue on other aspects: this is rightly the purpose of ABIA’s dossier “HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 in Brazil”.

With a gathering of 38 enriching interventions, the publication “Responses to AIDS in Brazil: enhancing the debate III (Annals)” is the third seminar-based collection of a series that ABIA has been holding since 1999, called “Enhancing the Debate”. These seminars are interdisciplinary, interregional, and intersectoral and seek to disseminate information, strengthen the mobilization and participation of the Brazilian society to respond to HIV. It fits in with ABIA’s intent to capacitate key (governmental, civil, academic, and medical/health) sectors in dealing with HIV/AIDS by facilitating its understanding in all its aspects, but also, in a time of uncertainties for the future of an exemplar policy success to address the epidemic, it serves as an act of political resistance.

With the contribution and/or endorsement of 100 academics from universities such as Harvard, Brown and Columbia, and of organizations such as Greenpeace USA, Amazon Watch, Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), Defend Democracy in Brazil, the USNDB has delivered to the Biden-Harris Administration urgent recommendations for US-Brazil Policy across 10 critical issues.

Founded and funded by the International AIDS Funding Agency (UNITAID) since 2010, the Medicine Patent Pool (MPP) aims to increase access and facilitate drug development for low and middle income countries through an innovative approach to voluntary licensing and patent breaking.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has called on the global community to voluntarily make available the knowledge, intellectual property and data needed to confront COVID-19. According to WHO, the priority is to stop the pandemic, interrupt the transmission of the new coronavirus and reverse the consequences of future global problems. For this, WHO advocates universal access to knowledge, intellectual property, data and other technologies in progress.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister, Helen Clark, and UN Under-Secretary-General, Winnie Byanyima, wrote a hard-hitting article against the pharmaceutical industry’s monopoly. The authors acknowledge the need for an urgent vaccine to end the COVID-19 pandemic. According to them, the world is likely to need a permanent dose of the vaccine and intellectual property is one of the barriers that prevent this vaccine from being available to everyone.