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1 So for ople at high risk, such as y days of the pandemic, when there These national systems are part of regional networks, and beyond that, there's a global system for health too: When a genome is sequenced in South Africa, leading to a vaccine that's developed in Europe, manufactured in India, and delivered to people in Nigeria, that is the global health system at work. Who pays for these systems? As a country moves out of poverty and achieves middleincome status, its government can start funding health care on its own. Many countries have made this transition over the past few decades, and today, only 15 percent [CHECK THIS] of the global population lives in low-income countries that still need help financing basic health care. Tragically, the pandemic was a huge setback to these systems. The WHO estimates that more than 115,000 health workers died of COVID between January 2020 and May 2021. 1 So for the sake of saving lives, making the world a fairer place, and preventing pandemics, we need to invest in these systems. In the short run, the world needs to: Distribute vaccines fairly--especially ensuring that people at high risk, such as the elderly and people who are immunocompromised, don't end up standing in line behind young, healthy adults. It is both inefficient and unfair to give a booster to a twenty-five-year-old with a clean bill of health before a fifty-yearold nurse and a person living with HIV get their first doses. Solve in-country delivery problems. In the early days of the pandemic, when there weren't enough vaccines to go around, high-income countries got the bulk of them. But that began to change as the world ramped up vaccine manufacturing, and the main limiting factor became not how few doses were reaching the developing world, but how few doses actually reached the people in need. The