EDITORIAL: The World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General (DG) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in a virtual press conference with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier on February 22, 2021 has blasted wealthy countries for hogging Covid vaccines, which is depriving poorer countries from getting them. So far we were privy to concerns that the rich and poor within countries may get unequal treatment in terms of access to the vaccines. Now the issue has assumed a global dimension, with fault lines running along the material divide. According to the ONE campaign, a global organisation co-founded by U2 singer Bono, the Group of Seven (G-7), the rest of the European Union (EU) and Australia have through direct deals with manufacturers between them bought nearly 1.25 billion more doses than they need to inoculate their entire populations. As the WHO DG has stated, this has meant that the previously agreed vaccine allocations for poorer countries under the Covax programme have been reduced. He also revealed that funding is no longer a problem as fresh contributions from the US, the EU and Germany mean the money is there to procure doses for the poorest countries, but it was worthless if there was nothing available to buy. Tedros urged the wealthy countries to first check whether their deals with pharmaceutical companies were undermining Covax, which poorer countries are relying on as they await even their first doses. The first wave of Covax vaccines, if they become available, is scheduled to be shipped out between late February and end June 2021. Some 145 participating economies are set to receive 337.2 million doses, enough to vaccinate over three percent of their combined populations. Covax hopes to raise this to up to 27 percent in lower income countries by end December 2021. The world’s biggest vaccine maker, India’s Serum Institute, on February 22, 2021 urged other countries to be ‘patient’ since it had been instructed to prioritise its home market. President Steinmeier seemed to endorse this stance by arguing that countries were understandably focused first and foremost on protecting their own citizens, but it made sense for the wealthier countries speeding ahead in the vaccine race to ensure that people in poorer countries were jabbed at the same time. He warned that if the wealthier countries refused to grant the necessary solidarity, we should not be surprised if other countries fill this vacuum, using it for their own ‘purposes’. Tedros called for intellectual property rights on Covid-19 medical goods to be waived to facilitate greater knowledge sharing and the rapid scaling up of production.
The inequality fault lines within and between countries have exposed the myths of global capitalism that private entrepreneurship is the only effective source of innovation and progress, and that markets are the best regulators of supply and demand and the optimal distribution of goods. For decades, Big Pharma has deprioritised vaccines as insufficiently profitable. This has been consistently the case from the Ebola outbreak in West Africa to the current Covid-19 pandemic. In the latter crisis, governments have funded Big Pharma with taxpayers’ money to rapidly develop a Covid-19 vaccine. Big Pharma thereby secured a cost-reduced development and risk-free launch of a new product. For Big Pharma, profit continued to trump all else. In contrast, at least two state-owned companies, Russia’s Gamaleya Institute and China’s Sinopharm, were successful in developing effective vaccines. All this points to the fact that relying on private sector vaccine development not only is too costly and exploitative, it is also inefficient since it prevents scientists from collaborating and sharing research to come up with the best possible vaccine in the shortest possible time. As to distributional efficiency, Tedros’ statements above should suffice. What the developed countries wedded to global capitalism fail to realize is the contradiction at the heart of their approach. An uneven (for the reasons adumbrated above) roll-out of the vaccine will in the end prove much costlier for the wealthy countries too as even if their own peoples are rendered safe, with the rest of the world still vulnerable, the disruption to travel and supply chains will lead to an inevitable global economic disaster to add to the economic and health pain already suffered. In an interconnected world, either we strive for immunity through vaccination for all, or there will be no immunity, with its enormous human and economic costs incalculable.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2021
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