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During Nobel Week last year, I led a conversation about pandemics with Nobel laureate Peter Doherty and author Hanne-Vibeke Holst. We did not know then that an entirely new virus had started infecting people in the city of Wuhan in China, but all experts agreed that it was only a matter of time before a new pandemic hit the world. Not knowing what was in front of us, Hanne-Vibeke Holst said that it is not just about surviving the pandemic, but that we must also survive morally. I’ve been thinking about it a lot this year.
At the beginning of the outbreak, some people called the new corona virus the great equalizer. Anyone could be affected, anyone could become seriously ill and die. But that was not true. As in so many other contexts, socio-economically weak groups are much more affected by the pandemic compared to socio-economically stronger groups. They are at higher risk of becoming seriously ill and dying and are adversely affected to a greater extent by closed communities and schools.
The pandemic is also hitting low-income countries the hardest. In the spring, everyone needed protective equipment for medical personnel, respirators, oxygen, and medications. It became a global shortage that especially affected countries with fewer resources.
Now it’s about vaccine. A vaccine against covid-19 is being developed at record speed and the hope is that there will be a vaccine approved by the end of the year or early next year. But every country will want a vaccine and it will not be possible to produce enough doses at first to meet the great need that exists.
That means great challenges. On the one hand, the vaccine should be distributed to the neediest groups within the countries. A major challenge is also distributing the vaccine equitably across countries. There is concern that rich countries, who can afford the most for the vaccine, will buy all the doses and leave low-income countries without them.
Therefore, the World Health Organization (WHO), together with the vaccine organizations Cepi and Gavi, has created the Covax initiative. The goal is to buy and distribute vaccine doses fairly, so that risk groups in all countries can be vaccinated. A large number of countries, many of them high-income countries, have already expressed interest in participating.
The White House has now announced that the United States will not participate in the vaccine collaboration. Instead, they will try to secure vaccines for their citizens on their own. It’s not unexpected from a country whose president has repeatedly promised to always put America first. Nor is the United States the only country that has refrained from participating in Covax.
This type of Vaccine nationalism can lead to low-risk people in rich countries being vaccinated, while risk groups in poorer countries are left without vaccines. Do we really want that?
