ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to approach the global COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of a critique of capitalism as a totalizing production and reproduction schematic. It concentrates on the situation on the Continent of Africa and the challenges posed by the continent's deployment of health system capacities and capabilities to care for its affected and infected populations. Notwithstanding such sentiment, Vaccine Apartheid had clearly been established. It, therefore, follows that access to medicines and vaccines in the context of the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health is of paramount concern. While access to vaccines was recognized as being essential for building global immunity against COVID-19, intellectual property rights constitute a “crucial obstacle for global vaccine access”. The chapter concludes by examining the contradiction between the socially determined political modalities of intellectual property regimes and the moral imperatives of saving people's lives.
