The past two decades have seen important progress in access to timely, reliable, affordable, and quality-assured supplies of vaccines of global public health importance. Global and regional financing and pooled procurement have shortened the lag between access in high- and lower-income countries. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that by addressing shortcomings and seizing opportunities, we can do even more.

Today, Monday 10 October is World Mental Health Day. The overall objective of World Mental Health Day is to raise awareness of mental health issues around the world and to mobilize efforts in support of mental health. I’ve used a gender lens to explore data related to global mental health and suicide rates, to explore how these have changed over the last 2 decades and to raise awareness to the gender paradox of suicide.

Facing concurrent crises of conflict, health, climate, inequality, and even democracy -- humanity has never needed institutions more. Institutions have helped the world achieve so much positive change. Yet in recent years, too many of our institutions have become less trusted, seen as less relevant, or ineffective. Given how much has changed in societies and the transformation opportunity that the fourth industrialization brings – we think it is time to reform, reimagine and rebuild institutions. We need them to be more fit for today’s world and the future. Join us in a collective brainstorm.

Last summer The Yellow House was lucky to have two brilliant graduate students from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health join us as interns: Meghana Atre and Tatum Chidlaw. They helped us with projects, conducted research and brought fresh ideas. Given the ongoing discussion on health equity – or inequity as the case is – we asked Meghana to research the question, “Should global and local public health take a justice lens instead of only an equity lens?" Implying a more root-cause and systems-based approach to outcomes but also a decolonisation of current public health architecture.

As widely acknowledged, the last two years have been unprecedented with the development and roll out of new vaccines. A year on since the first Covid-19 vaccines were approved for use, half of the world is fully vaccinated and COVAX just passed the one billionth dose delivered mark. At the same time, transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is higher than ever and even with the unprecedented vaccination progress, access to Covid-19 vaccines is still grossly inequitable. Eighty-eight countries have not met the WHO goal of vaccinating at least 40% of their populations by the end of 2021. In this context we started 2022 by seeing if there are lessons around access to Covid-19 vaccines in 2021 that could be applied to the year ahead so that equity and national and global vaccination goals are achieved.

The discussions about vaccine equity for Covid-19 vaccines have inspired us to think about vaccine equity for vaccines in general. Vaccines are one of the most cost-effective means of reducing mortality and morbidity; therefore, prolonged access gaps are a critical health equity issue. Here we present analysis that explores the length of time and some influencing factors for a vaccine to be introduced in high-income (HIC), middle-income(MIC) and low-income (LIC) countries -revealing interesting trends.

This note puts forth a brief analysis of Covid-19 vaccination goals. There has been a lot of discussion about contracts and equitable access, but we have not seen much analysis on the impact of goal setting.

The world has come together and made extraordinary scientific achievements in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. It's now time for unprecedented industrial collaboration to rapidly increase Covid-19 vaccine manufacturing capacity. Production of mRNA/DNA vaccines needs to be increased by 6.8 billion doses by the end of this year - in several locations across the world.

Our previous thought piece delved into the question of how many doses of Covid-19 vaccines are needed to protect front-line health workers and people at higher risk of severe or critical Covid-19 disease. We knew at that point we were leaving out all other essential workers and received several queries on what that number could be.

The race for Covid-19 vaccines is well underway. As is the thinking on how to allocate what will be a limited supply for the first many years of production. This thought piece looks at how many doses of Covid-19 are needed to protect people at risk of severe or critical Covid-19 disease and front-line health workers.

During these Covid-19 times, the Yellow House is sourcing most of our pandemic information directly from experts and data sources online. We can read it when we want to and with our own tone. Here is our current list of sources for the figures, modeling the future transmission curve, the top experts, as well as good news.

The world is in the midst of a defining moment. Last week marked 100 days since WHO confirmed the first case of Covid-19 and 6 weeks since a global pandemic was declared. In a short period of time, a massive amount of change has been thrust upon us as the SARS-CoV-2 virus makes its way around the world. What's here to stay, and what will continue to change? What could society look like after 1000 days?