(Episode 5) The Covid-19 Response in Africa and Inequalities in Global Health

Published on 24 March 2026 - Created by LUALA Beats Podcast team

Our world has been drastically reshaped by the Covid-19 epidemic. The pandemic revealed one crucial reality: global inequalities are deeply ingrained in how the world reacts to global health emergencies. We explore the devastating and under-researched impact of the Covid-19 response in Africa, which was largely influenced by the ‘big players’ and universal models of global health. These interventions have turned out to be inadequate to provide localized responses in African contexts. We ask how these unequal power structures in global health shaped the distribution of resources, vaccines through neo-colonial tropes to the detriment of African societies. In this episode, Dr. Sheila Varadan, Dr. Sara de Wit from the LUNHA hub, and students from the Research Master in African Studies, Ivan Anderegg and Artemis Mantheakis are in a conversation with prof. Toby Green, co-author ofthe book ‘The Covid Consensus: The Global Assault on Democracy and the Poor—A Critique from the Left’.