Rich countries have been on a vaccine shopping spree for months. A continuously updated database compiled by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center shows bilateral deals worth billions of dollars by a handful of countries for emerging vaccines. The Canadian government alone has secured enough inoculations to vaccinate their citizens five or even six times over. Canada's Minister of International Development Karina Gould said her country needed to hedge its bets because most vaccines are still in development and thus only theoretical.
Money can't buy vaccines that have already been sold.
Dr. Richard Mihingo, the coordinator of Immunization and Vaccine Development at the World Health Organization (WHO) Africa region, said he understood that countries needed to ensure that their own citizens get vaccinated. He called the bilateral deals a "sad reality."
"It is one thing to raise money, it is another to get access to the product. The funding is not enough if there is no supply. This complicates the situation," he said. "Until everybody is protected, nobody can be safe. We are living in an interconnected world and even if those countries can protect themselves, they will be living on an island. We need a world where we can interact. Not just socially, but economically," Mihingo said.
Several countries and regional blocks have preordered vaccines that could cover far more than their entire populations. Wealthy nations have bought enough Covid-19 vaccine doses to immunize their populations three times over. It is a harsh reminder that the race to end this deadly pandemic will separate the world's haves and the have-nots.
"It is disappointing that despite the intent to get equity across the globe, that vaccine nationalism rules supreme," said the University of Cape Town's Professor Gregory Hussey, who is on the ministerial committee to advise the South African government on access to a Covid-19 vaccine.
The head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention John Nkengasong said the inability for poorer countries to access vaccines would be "catastrophic."
"The moment that we have all talked about, of global solidarity and global cooperation, is now. The litmus test is actually now. It makes absolutely no moral sense to have excess doses of vaccines in certain countries and absolutely no doses of vaccines in other areas of the world."
Hussey believes that the Covid-19 vaccine debate will revive these painful memories. "This is not a new phenomenon. It has played itself out many times in the past," he said.
African public health officials and scientists still remember the years-long tooth-and-nail fight to access life-saving drugs to combat HIV/Aids long after they were available in the West. More recently, despite similar talk of solidarity, the H1N1 flu vaccine arrived on the continent months after the peak of the epidemic in 2009. There are numerous other historical and contemporary examples of life-saving drugs made available to the wealthy but not to the poor.
As rich countries vaccinate their citizens, it is likely that vaccine passports will become necessary for travel, study and commerce. This has already been tested by the Australian airline Qantas. It would be just one way that developing countries could be locked out as the rest of the world opens up.
"It reminds me of the old apartheid days where a black African needed a pass to get out of his ghetto and get into the city. The notion of no one left behind, it is a lot of balderdash at the end of the day," Hussey, the University of Cape Town's professor, said.
No comments:
Post a Comment