Women’s Health Outcomes

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for leading this debate, an initiative wholly consistent, if I may say so, with her long record of campaigning on behalf of women.

Even in these days of deliberately stoked and exaggerated culture wars, there can be few who do not agree that millennia of structural inequalities have undermined women’s health worldwide. Further, it is obvious that the current devastating pandemic has magnified every such inequality on the planet. This includes the shocking, yet predictable, rise in domestic violence during necessary lockdowns, reduced access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and other vital women’s health and social services internationally.

Women are more likely to be involved in childcare, social care and cleansing, whether in the home or outside it, placing millions of them on the front line of infection. While older men seem more likely to die of Covid-19, it seems that women who survive it may be more likely to suffer from the chronic symptoms associated with long Covid. That means that every current decision in the debate about how best to either combat or live with the virus is likely to have a gendered impact.

The extent to which casting off the mask has become associated with one’s love of freedom is unfortunate indeed. I worry about the way in which some in government have become so wedded to irreversible “business as usual” from a particular date that they are risking more than necessary and perhaps forgetting that, for many, business as usual, even before the pandemic, was far from free, fair, safe or healthy.

If the Government want to honour their promise to vaccinate the planet and an earlier pledge for a new era of global Britain, they must stop siding with Germany in blocking the TRIPS waiver at the WTO and join the United States, India, South Africa and most of the Commonwealth—celebrated here earlier this afternoon—in demanding that industry shares know- how around vaccines, tests and treatment manufacture so these can be decentralised and scaled up to meet global demand.

19 July is not “freedom day”, but it could yet be solidarity day in a global race against vaccine-resistant variants and even more deaths.