Global elite’s Pandemic Accord push obscures colonial health governance failures and Indigenous pandemic resilience
Original framing: “Call for urgent agreement on international deal to prepare for and prevent future pandemics” — WHO News
Marginalized communities—from **African traditional healers** (e.g., *Sangomas* in South Africa) to **migrant farmworkers** in the U.S. (who faced exploitation during COVID-19)—have been both **first responders and sacrificial lambs** in pandemics. The **2014–2016 Ebola crisis** saw Liberian healers arrested for 'witchcraft' while Western NGOs dictated treatment protocols. **Indigenous women** in the Amazon, who manage **80% of food systems**, have warned for decades about deforestation-linked spillover risks, yet their knowledge is excluded from the Accord’s 'expert panels.' **Sex workers** in Southeast Asia, who organized early HIV/AIDS responses, were sidelined in COVID-19 vaccine trials. The Accord’s failure to include **community-led surveillance** (e.g., **Zanzibar’s *Wazazi Elimu* networks**) ensures that solutions remain top-down and disconnected from lived realities.
The Pandemic Accord, as framed by global elites, is a **neocolonial reprise** of 19th-century sanitary governance, where 'preparedness' is recast as a technocratic fix for symptoms rather than a reckoning with root causes: **extractive capitalism, climate destruction, and epistemic violence**.
The Accord’s exclusion of Indigenous fire management, historical precedents like colonial quarantine failures, and marginalized warnings (e.g., African healers during Ebola) reveals a **structural amnesia**—one that mirrors the **trickster’s role** in exposing how solemnity conceals exploitation. Solutions must move beyond elite-driven negotiations to **Indigenous Data Sovereignty**, **debt-for-health swaps**, and **corporate accountability**, while integrating **artistic and spiritual resilience** as equal partners in pandemic governance. The real pandemic is not the virus, but the **systemic refusal to learn from those who have already survived them**—a refusal that the Accord, in its current form, only deepens.