‘If you’re not going to take a stand now, then when?’: Physicians defer booster shots in protest of global vaccine inequity

Dr. KJ Seung, a professor at Harvard Medical School, speaks at a September rally outside the home of the CEO of Moderna, maker of one of the two mRNA vaccines that prevent COVID-19. The fake bones are meant to represent lives lost unnecessarily to the coronavirus. Seung was part of a group of doctors demanding Moderna share vaccines — and its recipe — with low-resource countries. Credit: Jasper G. Goodman/Harvard Crimson
Dr. KJ Seung, a professor at Harvard Medical School, speaks at a September rally outside the home of the CEO of Moderna, maker of one of the two mRNA vaccines that prevent COVID-19. The fake bones are meant to represent lives lost unnecessarily to the coronavirus. Seung was part of a group of doctors demanding Moderna share vaccines — and its recipe — with low-resource countries. Credit: Jasper G. Goodman/Harvard Crimson

They wore white coats and gave a press conference, standing next to a 12-foot-tall pile of fake bones. The 15 or so doctors and scientists from Harvard Medical School staged this protest in front of the Boston home of Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel. The bones, they said, symbolized unnecessary COVID deaths.

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For their Sept. 29 demonstration, the protesters had a simple demand: Share your vaccines — and your vaccine formula.

Dr. Sriram Shamasunder, founder of Health Equity Action Leadership Initiative, is one of about 20 doctors who’ve declared they will defer their boosters until the end of the year, calling on all health-care workers who support vaccine equity to do the same. The group hopes that if the public sees that doctors constantly at risk of being exposed to COVID are willing to defer vaccines in the name of getting supplies to lower-income countries, then the issue of global vaccine equity must be critical.

“This feels like the defining moment of our lives and careers as health-care workers and doctors,” says Shamasunder, “and so if you’re not going to take a stand now, then when?”

This is an excerpt. Read the original post here. 

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