"I have seen this happen in recent years with regard to pharmaceuticals and vaccines, where, working together, we are improving access to medicines and vaccines for infectious diseases in the poorest countries"
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A bureaucratic sentence with a moral payload: Brundtland is making “partnership” sound like common sense while quietly staking out a controversial theory of change for global health. The verb choice matters. “Working together” launders hard politics into a feel-good process, implying that public agencies, private drugmakers, donors, and multilateral institutions can align without anyone surrendering power or profit. That’s aspirational rhetoric, but also a defensive move in a period when the pharmaceutical industry was under intensifying scrutiny for pricing, patents, and access.
The line’s core intent is legitimacy-building. By pointing to “recent years,” she signals that this isn’t utopian talk; it’s a report from the field. The concrete subjects - “pharmaceuticals and vaccines” - evoke measurable wins (immunization campaigns, antiretrovirals, mass procurement) rather than abstract development promises. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the fatalism that used to surround “the poorest countries,” framing them as reachable by systems design: supply chains, bulk purchasing, tiered pricing, pooled demand.
Subtext: access is being “improved,” not solved, and the improvement is attributed to collaboration rather than to confrontation. That’s strategic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, debates over TRIPS, generic manufacturing, and the AIDS crisis forced global institutions to choose between protecting intellectual property and preventing mass death. Brundtland, a politician with a public-health résumé, positions herself in the pragmatic middle: championing equity while keeping industry at the table. The sentence reassures donors and companies that they’re partners, not villains - even as it asks them, politely, to act like stewards of the global commons.
The line’s core intent is legitimacy-building. By pointing to “recent years,” she signals that this isn’t utopian talk; it’s a report from the field. The concrete subjects - “pharmaceuticals and vaccines” - evoke measurable wins (immunization campaigns, antiretrovirals, mass procurement) rather than abstract development promises. It’s also a subtle rebuke to the fatalism that used to surround “the poorest countries,” framing them as reachable by systems design: supply chains, bulk purchasing, tiered pricing, pooled demand.
Subtext: access is being “improved,” not solved, and the improvement is attributed to collaboration rather than to confrontation. That’s strategic. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, debates over TRIPS, generic manufacturing, and the AIDS crisis forced global institutions to choose between protecting intellectual property and preventing mass death. Brundtland, a politician with a public-health résumé, positions herself in the pragmatic middle: championing equity while keeping industry at the table. The sentence reassures donors and companies that they’re partners, not villains - even as it asks them, politely, to act like stewards of the global commons.
Quote Details
| Topic | Health |
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