Global Council Report Reveals Inequality-Pandemic Cycle

Proven actions can break the cycle, say experts

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South Africa is not treating its G20 presidency as ceremonial. It is using the platform to make an argument that reaches far beyond aid, health or moral appeal: inequality is not a social crisis to be managed, but a structural global risk that determines who survives the next pandemic and who does not.

Failure to tackle the deep inequalities within and between countries, it points out, puts the whole world in greater danger. The strategic calculation is that once inequality is recognised as systemic, it moves out of the language of compassion and into the language of collective security, regulation and liability.

That argument sharpened in Johannesburg this week with the launch of a new report by the Global Council on Inequality, AIDS and Pandemics, convened by UNAIDS and co-led by Winnie Byanyima, Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, former Namibian First Lady Monica Geingos and epidemiologist Sir Michael Marmot. The report does not appeal for generosity. It warns that inequality has now become a pandemic accelerant — the ignition point that decides who is infected first, who dies first, and who recovers last.

“The more unequal a society is, the deadlier and longer a pandemic becomes,” Byanyima told the launch. “Inequality makes us more vulnerable to disease outbreaks and it traps us in a vicious cycle. Pandemics do not level us. They expose us.”

Marmot dismantled the lingering myth that pandemics are egalitarian events. “At the start of COVID-19, the world pretended that prince and pauper were equally at risk. The data showed the opposite. The poorer you were, the more likely you were to be exposed, hospitalised and die.” The pattern, he said, held not only for COVID-19, but for HIV, tuberculosis, Ebola and influenza. “Pandemics are magnifying devices for social injustice.”