Abstract
Inequities in access to life-saving medicines during pandemics are not aberrations but symptoms of the postcoloniality of global health law. This legal framework sustains the racialised exclusion of Global South people, preserving remnants of early global efforts to contain disease in colonial spaces in the pursuit of furthering global trade. Tracing the historical trajectory of access to medicines from racialised colonial efforts aimed at disease containment to the modern intellectual property regime reveals how global health law, as a postcolonial technology, reinforces racialised hierarchies and associated structural vulnerabilities, but may also offer emancipatory promises. But to what extent can this emancipatory promise provide a platform for transformative structural change in global health? Through the scholarship on reparative justice, this article argues that reparations are a necessary intervention to address inequities in global health. In order to be effective, reparations must go beyond acknowledging past injustices to instituting material changes in global health through new international agreements that centre the global south, reforming structures to enable vaccine manufacturing in the global south and greater south-south collaborations to tackle a culture of dependency.