The pandemic rages on—not by accident, but by design.

As we enter the third year of the COVID-19 crisis, two battles are underway. One is led by the carers of the world in overcrowded hospitals, fighting to end the pandemic. Another is by corporate executives in closed boardrooms, fighting to prolong it.

The question at the very center of both is this—who will control medical recipes worth billions of dollars, and millions of lives?

As some countries roll out booster programs, less than 6% of Africa’s more than a billion people have been fully inoculated. Big pharmaceutical companies are letting the pandemic go on—and why not, according to a recent estimate, Pfizer is expected to make astronomical profits—$107bn in cumulative sales by the end of 2022 on its COVID-19 vaccines, now being dubbed a “megablockbuster.” Key to this is complete control over production, price, and profit. If more of our factories, wherever they might be, could start producing vaccines for the people in their countries, companies like Pfizer would lose their monopoly. They know this.

Right now, the World Trade Organization is considering a proposal that would temporarily waive patent protections on vaccine recipes. Over 164 countries have supported it. But the pharmaceutical industry is fighting back, hard—through the governments it lobbies. The European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Singapore have successfully blocked it for over a year.

But as the ministers convene, once again, in Geneva on Nov. 30, a new global movement is readying its fight: 2.5 million nurses are taking these COVID-19 criminals to court. In an unprecedented move, unions from 28 countries, coordinated by the Global Nurses United and the Progressive International—have filed a complaint with the United Nations alleging human rights violations by these countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a detailed letter addressed to Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Physical and Mental Health, dozens of nursing unions noted that “the end of this pandemic is nowhere in sight” as “Covid-19 cases continue to soar in numerous parts of the world, while pharmaceutical companies and governments have failed to ensure that critical treatments and vaccines are distributed equitably in order to respond to the pandemic.”

“This unequal distribution of vaccines is not only grossly unjust for the people in low- and moderate-income countries who remain at high risk for contracting and further transmitting Covid-19, it also provides for the possibility for the development of new variants, some of which may be resistant to the current available vaccines,” the filing reads. “The development and spread of new variants pose a dire risk to all people around the world.”

The complaint specifically targets the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, and Singapore, wealthy nations that have stonewalled the patent waiver at the World Trade Organization (WTO), defying the will of a majority of that institution’s member countries.

By blocking the patent waiver, the small group of rich nations is “endangering millions of lives around the world,” the nurses declare in a petition accompanying their formal U.N. complaint.

“This is a clear violation of our right to health—of nurses, caregivers, and patients. So we are now taking them to court,” the petition continues. “We demand an urgent investigation into the obstruction of the waiver by these Covid-19 criminals.”

Coordinated by Global Nurses United and Progressive International, the nurses’ U.N. complaint was submitted as scientists and political leaders worldwide grappled with the potential threat posed by Omicron, the fifth coronavirus strain to be designated a “variant of concern” by the World Health Organization (WHO). First detected in Botswana, cases of the variant have since been identified in South Africa, Australia, Israel, the U.K., Canada, and elsewhere.

In its complaint on Sunday, the coalition of nursing unions argues that the proliferation of variants is a predictable outcome of rich nations’ refusal to “distribute vaccines and treatments equitably to the vast majority of people of low- and moderate-income countries.”

“Nurses and other healthcare workers have been on the frontlines of the Covid-19 pandemic response, and we have witnessed the staggering numbers of deaths and the immense suffering caused by political inaction,” the filing states. “High-income countries have procured upwards of 7 billion confirmed vaccine doses, while low income countries have only been able to procure approximately 300 million doses. This has created what public health advocates around the world have described as ‘vaccine apartheid.'”

“It is now clear: Continued opposition to the TRIPS waiver is resulting in the violation of human rights of peoples across the world,” the document continues, citing Article 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. “These countries have violated our rights and the rights of our patients—and caused the loss of countless lives—of nurses and other caregivers and those we have cared for.”

The nurses’ complaint is not simply a legal fight: it is radical call to expose and defeat the governments that have been holding the lives of people hostage in order to service corporate superprofits.

The leaders of these nations have been explicit about the world they seek to build: Early in the pandemic, the UK parliament’s foreign affairs select committee called for a “G20 for public health.” This is a revealing analogy. Much like the G20, these countries have, in effect, hijacked international institutions and actively undermined the sovereignty of other nations, while enjoying complete impunity for their actions.

Consider the principal opponent to the waiver proposal at the WTO: the EU. In May 2020, European Parliamentarians, the only members directly elected by citizens in the EU system, voted to back the waiver to “address global production constraints and supply shortage.” Yet, for the next six months, the European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of Europe at the WTO has stubbornly resisted the waiver. This is entirely unsurprising if we look at who the European commissioners and their cabinets meet: Since March 2020, they have had 161 meetings with Big Pharma in the same time frame that they managed to meet one NGO in favour of the waiver.

Nothing stood in their way as they throttled democracy and gave free reign to a deadly virus. Not global health organizations, two-thirds of which are headquartered in the US, UK, and Switzerland. Not international institutions, whose austerity agendas, have over decades, decimated public health systems in developing nations even as 83% of all government health spending occurred in the affluent world. Not the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—which, it turns out, urged Oxford to reverse their decision to share their vaccine technology with the world.

The COVID-19 criminals have made their disregard for universal human rights and international law clear. It is now up to us to reclaim the enormous power that the UN charter, the WTO, WHO, and international law hold, and deploy them as tools.

(This article has been compiled by us based on articles in Progressive International and Common Dreams. The Progressive International is an international organization uniting and mobilizing progressive left-wing activists and organizations. Common Dreams is a US non-profit newsportal.)