This article critically examines the inequities in the access to COVID-19 vaccine and the lessons for global health law. Despite the rapid development and approval of COVID-19 vaccines, the rollout exposed severe systemic failures rooted in preexisting economic distortions and market inefficiencies. The article argues that addressing vaccine inequity requires more than improved distribution and solidarity, but effective reinvention of the global vaccine supply chain through evidence-based and meaningful market-shaping measures. It calls for a transformative approach to global health governance, emphasising the need for a comprehensive, human rights-compliant policy framework to correct structural problems in international markets, moving beyond superficial exhortations to equity.

In this article, we examine the relationship between the World Health Organization International Health Regulations (IHR) and human rights and its implications for IHR reform, considering the evolution of human rights in the 2005 IHR, the role of human rights in IHR reforms and the implications of these reforms in key domains including equity and solidarity, medical countermeasures, core capacities, travel restrictions, vaccine certificates, social measures, accountability, and financing.

Looking into these times of neoconservatism in Brazil, marked by a far-right agenda and populism, this Article explores the role of vulnerability (as a legal theory, a legal principle or factual consideration) in the litigation prompted by the pandemic in Brazil. The usages of vulnerability as a form of resistance to the denial of their identity and vulnerable condition show that vulnerability can take different forms through litigants and may have an independent meaning to what is defined in legal theory or law. This is most evident by the fact that litigants dispute government policies based on ideologies that contest their identities (and not merely their vulnerability). Four case studies substantiate this Article with lawsuits brought to higher courts by judicially active groups: prisoners, indigenous people, Afro-Brazilian ethnic communities and gig economy drivers. They are what I call “undeserving vulnerables”, groups discriminated from a legally recognized vulnerable group through attacks to their identity.