PMA Statement: Renewing Our Vision in the Face of Global Health Crisis

The People’s Medicine Alliance reaffirms its unwavering commitment to ensuring fair access for all to life-saving medicines, especially at this pivotal moment in global health and political history. We believe access to safe and affordable healthcare including medicines is a basic human right for all, not a privilege for the few. We are deeply alarmed by cuts to international aid, inadequate public spending on health, and commercialisation of healthcare that threaten to reverse decades of progress in global health.

President Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s attacks on lifesaving aid from the American people to the world through USAID are shameful and appalling. While the U.S. is the largest donor of foreign aid, this funding accounts for only about one percent of the federal budget. Yet, it supports nurses, doctors, and other health workers, as well as essential medicines and medical technologies across the Global South. It also funds disease monitoring and outbreak response—critical services that protect all of humanity. This aid saves lives every single day. Now, all of it is in jeopardy due to a cruel and arbitrary decision by two of the richest men on earth, targeting the world’s poorest people.

Furthermore, proposals that deepen corporate control over public health aid, such as giving Wall Street more influence in foreign aid, undermine public systems everywhere. This shift will neither serve struggling Americans nor those dependent on global health services. We reject these dangerous policies and call for international solidarity to uphold and protect these vital services.

However, in the long-term , President Trump’s decisions also demonstrate clearly that the countries of the Global South cannot rely upon the aid of the United States and the charitable motivations of rich nations. This was clear during COVID-19 too, as rich nations chose to put the profiteering of pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer ahead of sharing the vital vaccine technology that could have enabled production in the Global South and hence protection from this new killer disease.  This global Vaccine Apartheid demonstrated vividly how, when crises arise, the lives of the people of the Global South are dispensable and disposable.

1. High-income countries including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, France and the Netherlands to reverse their cuts to humanitarian aid that saves lives, expands universal healthcare, and protects human rights. And for all donors to scale up their aid to support the Global South.
2. High-income countries to enable Global South governments to invest in healthcare by supporting meaningful debt cancellation, a crackdown on tax avoidance, and proper global taxation of the wealthy.
3. Global South countries to step up their own commitment to adequate funding of public healthcare, including access to health technologies, education, and medical research, with full public scrutiny of government budgets.
4. Global South governments to urgently develop South-South cooperation and regional mechanisms on:
   • Scale up investments in research and development, expand medical technology production and build public models that break away from IP monopolies
   • Support and empower community-led responses
   • Take action to increase taxation on the wealthiest individuals and corporations to fund these vital investments
5. All countries to properly fund regional and international institutions which can support this work, including the World Health Organisation, ensuring they are not dependent on rich nations or billionaires.

Together, we can shape a future in which health is a human right guaranteed for everyone, everywhere. This is our vision, and we renew it with resolve, urgency, and hope.

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This statement was signed by the following Steering Committee members: Global Justice Now, Oxfam, PMA LAC and PMA Asia.

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