It was late 2019 and over a year had passed since I had last visited the clinic for a blood draw related to the experimental vaccine I had taken four years earlier. I hadn’t given it a thought in nearly as long when I received the call: “Mr Harasta? We have bad news about the dengue vaccine trial.”

In these days of COVID-19, I have often thought back to the events of that vaccine trial, its failure, and the consequences that failure had for me while the politics of vaccine production have gone from fringe to front and center as we grapple with our global response to the pandemic.

Like everyone, socialists and the wider left have struggled to keep up with the constantly shifting science and its accompanying toxic politics. As socialists, however, we have a particular responsibility and power to take action in the defense of humanity. An opportunity to act on those commitments will soon emerge as we are confronted with a whole range of ethical issues related to human tests for the vaccine. Just as we organize our workplaces and communities, we must organize the trials to ensure those ethical issues aren’t decided in favor of for-profit medical companies rather than human need.