Throughout the pandemic you have been critical about vaccine inequity, especially in Africa. How did it feel when the W.H.O. director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asked you to be special envoy to the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator?
I had been one of the most critical voices at some of the outputs of the ACT Accelerator. I had been agitator No. 1 for vaccine inequity. So my first thought was, “Oh my God, they will all hate me.”
It was a shake-up of the status quo; a fox in the henhouse. When Tedros called me to ask if I would do it, I said, “Have you got the right number?” And then I said, “Oh, no, no, no.” So he asked me to think about it, saying, “Your voice is needed, your steer is needed.”
I spoke to my husband, and he said, “Yodi, you have been at the forefront of saying those of us from the global south need to be heard. They have invited you to that table, you cannot say no.”
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