2025
A Curriculum for Cure: African Communities Step Into the Future of HIV Science
30 June 2025
In June 2025, a room full of activists, scientists, and community leaders marked a revolutionary milestone. In a boardroom at the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ), members of the African HIV Cure Consortium (AHCC) accepted a radical invitation to take their rightful place at the centre of the African cure science.
Dangerous fantasy: US ambassador Dybul said SA was ready to transition off Pepfar. It wasn’t
17 June 2025
It was a neat soundbite, delivered with the polished assurance of someone who has spent years navigating donor boardrooms. But it was also a dangerous fiction, one that we are now watching unravel in real time.
No Clinics, No Data, No Justice: How South Africa Is Failing Sex Workers
2 June 2025
On 2 June, we observe International Sex Workers Day, a date rooted in defiance. It marks the 1975 occupation of Saint-Nizier Church in Lyon by over 100 sex workers protesting police harassment, abuse, and state neglect. Nearly five decades later, that occupation feels less like history and more like prophecy.
Amid all the talk about preventing gender-based violence, sex workers are ignored
2 June 2025
What makes sex work dangerous are the laws, policies and attitudes that surround it.
We call your name so you may not sleep: An ancestral reckoning for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
27 May 2025
The US Secretary of Health may continue to operate with impunity and will probably never face formal consequences. But he will not escape the memory of what he has done.
Africa Day at the Master’s Feet: Dignity Traded, Justice Deferred
25 May 2025
They dismantled our health systems, rewrote our laws, and still we applauded. On this Africa Day, we must confront the truth: our dignity is no longer taken, it is offered.
Vaccines: The US is endangering children while Africa leads the way
23 May 2025
Every year, Immunisation Week arrives as a gentle global reminder of the power of prevention — of the syringe over the scalpel, the clinic over the emergency room, the vaccine card over the death certificate. And yet this year, it comes cloaked in a darker tone.
The Global Fund has just made history – now it must start a revolution
21 May 2025
On 6 May 2025, a quiet revolution took place. The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria announced it had, for the first time in its history, procured a first-line HIV treatment manufactured on African soil. The product, made in Kenya by Universal Corporation, is set to be distributed to 72 000 people in Mozambique every year.
Minister Motsoaledi: We Are Not AfriForum. We Are The Reason You Have A Health System To Defend
16 May 2025
There is a line that should never be crossed, even in the heat of political pressure and public scrutiny. This week, South Africa’s Minister of Health, Aaron Motsoaledi, did just that.
Immunisation Is the Future of Pandemic Survival
1 May 2025
African countries like Uganda and South Africa are rewriting the rules of emergency response. The rest of the world must follow – or fall behind.
A lifeline in freefall: Inaction could cost a million lives over 10 years if Pepfar disappears
19 March 2025
Models show that losing Pepfar completely could cost South Africa between 600 000 and a million lives over ten years, depending on how quickly and effectively the health system responds.
2024
What researchers learnt from five baby boys in KwaZulu-Natal about an HIV cure
10 December 2024
Twenty-three years ago, 11-year-old Nkosi Johnson stepped onto the stage at the International Aids Conference in Durban, addressing an audience of 60 million. His words exposed the pain and stigma of the pandemic while showing extraordinary courage and belief in a better future.
How South Africa can help secure immediate, global access to HIV prevention drug lenacapavir
7 November 2024
We need nothing less than disruptive action to ensure everyone who wants access to affordable lenacapavir can get it.
Why Gilead’s ‘generosity’ on HIV jab belies a betrayal
4 October 2024
This week, we heard that six generic drug companies have signed voluntary licensing deals to make the HIV prevention injection lenacapavir, royalty free, for 120 low-income countries where the burden is high.
Global health equity undermined by US propaganda against Chinese Covid-19 vaccines
27 June 2024
There’s an African proverb that goes, “when two elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled”, which means the weak suffer most in conflicts between the powerful. It’s slightly overused, perhaps because it applies so often.
There’s More To Self-Care Than Scented Candles Or Massages, It’s A Key Public Health Tool
22 April 2024
There’s a new “It Girl” in the world of public health, and her name is “self-care”. This type of self-care is not about scented candles or massages. It’s about something far more radical: giving young people the power to protect and improve their own health without the help of health workers, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
Africa can’t let rich countries forget what they did to us in Covid
13 March 2024
It’s not often that African health activists are pleasantly surprised by developments in global health. But this past weekend, the latest version of the draft Pandemic Accord delivered a rare moment of relief. And just in time.
2023
Nightmare before Christmas: 15-million inner condoms stuck in SABS lab
18 December 2023
Fifteen shipments of inner condoms from five suppliers haven’t gone to clinics because of broken equipment at the South African Bureau of Standards.
Meet Maya Gokul, South Africa’s female condom high priestess
6 December 2023
Maya Gokul has been teaching people in South Africa and all over the world about female condoms for more than 25 years, and has no intention of stopping. She considers her job of equipping health workers with knowledge, skills and a positive attitude about reproductive health to be a lifelong calling.
2022
New WTO deal is a slap in the face for poorer countries
18 June 2022
Tian Johnson, Yousuf Vawda and Fatima Hassan argue that a new deal struck by the World Trade Organisation – which did not include an intellectual-property waiver for vaccines – is a massive setback for the cause of global health equity.
Say no to rich nations and WTO bullying in Geneva – why South Africa should stand up and not be silenced
15 June 2022
African Alliance Founder and Strategist Tian Johnson, Yousuf Vawda from the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s School of Law and Fatima Hassan from the Health Justice Initiative Fatima Hassan wrote an op-ed on reasons that South Africa (along with other groups) and indeed all countries committed to enabling access and thus ending the Covid-19 pandemic, should reject the bad deal and text being negotiated in the WTO’s Ministerial Conference.
Institution’s Reputation Over Covid Medicines Access
13 June 2022
African Alliance Founder and Strategist Lead Tian Johnson and Melinda St. Louis, director at Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch write about the shameful inaction by WTO to secure a comprehensive waiver of intellectual property rules to achieve vaccine equity.
More than two years into the pandemic with an estimated 15 million lives lost – due to the EU’s intransigence, the WTO has still not secured a comprehensive waiver of intellectual property rules that should have been delivered on day one.
This shameful inaction by the WTO contributed to the tragic reality that still only 15% of people in low-income countries have received their first shot, and the world will be ill-prepared to ramp up rapid production of next-generation vaccines targeting new variants, as well as lifesaving treatments and diagnostics.
Vaccine inequity deepens structural racial discrimination. Institutional failures enabling global COVID inequity can also deepen structural discrimination.
11 April 2022
Open Global Rights: Over five decades ago, the first codified global human rights instrument on racial injustice, the International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. As we celebrated the 56th anniversary of the ICERD a few months ago, it is disheartening that two years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, inequalities in vaccine and healthcare access continue to deepen along racial and intersectional lines.
2021
An Inconvenient Truth: The real reason why Africa is not getting vaccinate
12 October 2021
Only 2.5% of the world’s COVID vaccines have gone to African countries. As a result of vaccine hoarding by rich countries, more than 100-million COVID doses could go to waste this year. Rather than focusing on the high levels of vaccine equity, pharmaceutical companies are trying to shift the blame onto vaccine hesitancy on the continent.
Sex workers, former inmates and people who use drugs help to feed the world during the pandemic
11 August 2021
As India suffered a devastating surge in Covid-19 cases and deaths, the vital role of community-led organisations became clearer than ever. And like similar organisations around the world, they are leading on one essential community service – providing food. Now funders need to catch up and put more unrestricted funding into the hands of community-based organisations that represent and understand marginalised communities. And they need to explicitly include food provision as an essential part of pandemic relief.
Vaccine hesitancy or Systemic Racism?
22 June 2021
Minority communities and developing-country populations may approach health services cautiously – and with good reason, given the medical profession’s history of inhumanity. But, by blaming low COVID-19 vaccination rates on vaccine hesitancy, the profession is effectively using this history to victimize the same communities again.
We are closer to an HIV vaccine now more than ever before
18 May 2021
It took less than a year for researchers to develop a vaccine against COVID-19. The search for an HIV vaccine began almost 40 years ago.
The unprecedented pace at which the COVID-19 jabs were developed and the scientific breakthrough they required have re-energised those efforts to develop an HIV vaccine. But they have also raised critical questions about what could have been if the search for an HIV vaccine had met with the same resources and political will as the coronavirus pandemic
2020
Pandemics and plans: Why South Africa needs to reimagine its HIV strategy
1 December 2020
Although new HIV infection sfeel by an impressive percentage between 2010 and 2019,the COVID-19pandemic has led to setbacks. Some of these setbacks include a reduction in HIV medication and HIV viral load testing. As a result, South Africa needs to startthinking about how it can re-imagine the futureof its responses.
SA’s latest COVID-19 vaccine trial crucial for future access
9 November 2020
South Africa’s newest COVID-19 vaccine trial is another crucial step in ensuring a future vaccine works for South Africans and should be commended. South African scientists’ leading role in COVID-19 vaccine research takes us a step closer in ensuring that history doesn’t repeat itself in this pandemic
South Africa has launched a third COVID-19 vaccine trial. Here’s what you need to know
1 November 2020
South Africa is set to begin a new research study to see if an experimental vaccine can prevent COVID-19 or reduce the risk of serious symptoms. Science is moving fast to try to contain the pandemic, but it should not and cannot afford to leave communities behind.
The Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, the South African Medical Research Council and pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson launched the Ensemble study today. The clinical research trial features an experimental COVID-19 vaccine that scientists hope will protect people from becoming infected with the new coronavirus or developing serious COVID-19 disease.
Who would you trust to watch as the world decides who does — and doesn’t — get a COVID-19 vaccine?
1 October 2020
The World Health Organization and international donors have created a body to make sure poor countries get their fair share of a COVID-19 vaccine — when it comes. But who will be watching as the world’s leaders and scientists decide who gets and who goes without? The globe’s best hope for an accountable and transparent process can’t be left to chance. It also can’t be left solely to government officials and donors
Advocates Statement on Standard of Care in COVID-19 Research
5 June 2020
Statement issued by the Universal Access to Personal Protective Equipment Platform for Health Care Workers, The Vaccine Advocacy Resource Group, COVID-19 Front[1], The Treatment Action Campaign, WACI Health, the New HIV Vaccine and Microbicide Advocacy Society (NHVMAS) and JARID International. The concerns raised in this letter have also been brought to the attention of the leadership of DENOSA, the Democratic Nursing Organisation of South Africa.