Vanguard Report: Inequality and antibiotic resistance

COVID-19 has focused global attention on the inequitable access to tools needed to mitigate a pandemic, with high-income countries (HICs) and low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) at opposite ends of the scale. In the case of antibiotic resistance, a pandemic projected to cause 4 times more deaths per year than occurred from COVID-19 during 2020, inequity also reigns supreme – lack of access to antibiotics in some poorer countries, a driver of mortality particularly in children under 5 years of age, lack of access to newer, expensive antibiotics needed to treat the increasing toll of multi- and extensively-resistant bacterial infections, and lastly and most importantly, the inequity in ability to provide the basic public health interventions that drive many of the social determinants of infectious diseases in LMICs.