On this April 7th, World Health Day, we gathered testimonials from three feminist militant women from different parts of the world on the struggle for the right to health, the fight against the pandemic and against the effects of this crisis on women’s lives, especially black women. Talitha Demenjour (Brazil), Julie Maenaut (Belgium) and Wilhelmina Trout (South Africa) showed how the fight for the right to health is articulated with the fight against neoliberalism and against the privatization of public services. The transnational and capitalist competition for patents and the colonialist inequality of access to vaccines have profound impacts on women’s lives, especially in the countries of the South.
The feminist and grassroots ways out of the pandemic point to the valorization of public health systems, the fair distribution and production of vaccines, and the reorganization of the work that overburdens women and sustains life.
Corporate profits are not more important than the lives of millions of poor people around the globe. (Wilhelmina Trout)
