Frustrations of a Longtime Global Issues Activist; Comment on “Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy”

Abstract

Labonté’s first commentary1 concluded with what I wholeheartedly agree, namely that “we need an activist public health movement to ensure there is sufficient political will to adopt them.” In their follow-up commentary, Moers and colleagues2 looked at things from a slightly different angle saying that to achieve equity will need radical changes in economic thinking and policies; they added that advocates needed to be strategic about framing and use hope-based communication and develop attractive and convincing narratives: “By doing so, hopefully we can bring these messages across to larger groups of people.” Well, I think that, together with many others, I have been strategic and radical, but only to accumulate a large bag of disappointments and broken hopes in trying to ‘bring the message across.’ But I come back to memories of so many defeats that I, with others, have lived through. Here, I describe my frustrations but explain why I do not give up hope.

Keywords

• flawed global governance
• cooptation of un bodies
• defending multilateralism
• resisting multistakeholderism
• needed engagements