ABSTRACT
Even as the COVID-19 pandemic retreats into a relatively more manageable phenomenon, the costs of the global failure to overcome “vaccine apartheid”—including through expeditiously supporting a waiver proposal at the World Trade Organization (WTO)—are still being counted. This is especially so in the Global South, where inadequate access to COVID-19 vaccines has exacerbated exclusion, marginalization, and invisibility and has resulted in disproportionate burdens and impacts for poor women of color. Providing a gendered analysis of the impacts of vaccine apartheid, this chapter offers some insights into how international human rights can be mobilized in the effort to ensure that trade law is not used to justify the power imbalances and systematic inequalities that COVID-19 has both exposed and entrenched.
