Ebola Doc: ‘COVAX Is Just a Way for White Men to Absolve Their Conscience’
Liberian Dr. James Soka Moses remembers the West African region’s devastating Ebola outbreak as if it were yesterday: the roaring ambulances, the patients lying on the floor and spilling outside of treatment facilities, the smell of vomit and the sight of death and suffering that still comes to him in flashbacks seven years later.
“The memory is so fresh because it was just so devastating and took a real toll on life and everything, so it’s hard to just forget that,” he said in a recent interview. Moses, who studied medicine in Liberia and infectious disease control in London, works as a research physician for the Partnership for Research on Ebola Virus in Liberia, or Prevail. The partnership is a collaboration with the Ministry of Health in Liberia and the United States’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). Moses also spent the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic treating patients and continues to work as a university lecturer.
This experience of the West African Ebola outbreak that killed more than 11,000 people and left three of the world’s poorest nation’s health systems reeling, has now motivated Moses and other medics and public health specialists who fought on the frontlines against the virus to sign an open letter to the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO) before the World Health Assembly meets later this month, calling for vaccine equality. The Assembly is the decision-making body of the WHO.