As German Chancellor Angela Merkel met with President Joe Biden inside the White House on Thursday, July 15, a puppet replica of her stood outside, body bags laid at its feet.

The body bags were meant to symbolize global deaths from COVID-19 since India and South Africa first proposed the idea of a vaccine patent waiver last October, which would bypass intellectual property rights and speed along an urgent scale-up of vaccine production to address the pandemic worldwide.

The death toll stands, since October, at about three million, many of them avoidable if vaccines had been available in the global South. Oxfam estimates that at the “current vaccination rate low income countries would be waiting 57 years for everyone to be fully vaccinated.” Vaccine production has created nine new billionaires, but only 1 percent of people in poor countries have received their first dose.