The troubling rise of vaccine nationalism

December 29th, 2020

Awake Goy

In the early days of
the ongoing health crisis there was a sense that everyone had an
obligation to protect the people around them, even those they didn’t
know. For a time, most of those not heroically engaged in risky
essential work, even on the political right, seemed willing to go
along with this in the interest of the greater good.

Many of us hoped
that this spontaneous solidarity might widen to include the whole
globe, especially those poor countries where widespread poverty and
suffering were the long ignored norm before the novel coronavirus
appeared. Unfortunately, this isn’t how things are turning out.

While
self-proclaimed nationalists like the leaders of the United States
and Brazil outright rejected the idea that a global pandemic requires
a global response and spent much of their energy creating divisions
within their own countries over the emerging science of lockdowns and
masking, many of those considered liberal or even progressive in
richer nations took a quieter but similar approach to the procurement of things like personal protective equipment (PPE) and now, vaccines and expensive treatments.

Here in Canada, our
ostensibly liberal government has managed to procure at least 5 doses of vaccine for every citizen (including some from candidates still
awaiting approval) from seven different companies, at present the
worst example of such hoarding in the world. The numbers are somewhat lower in European allies and slightly more than 2 doses per person in the United States, whose large population and arguably, the ineptitude of its federal
government, led to fewer shots available for the country’s
citizens.

As reported by the
BBC, “…even though rich nations represent just 14% of the world’s
population, they have bought up 53% of the most promising vaccines so
far, according to data from eight leading vaccine candidates in Phase
3 trials that have done substantial deals with countries worldwide.”

While it’s understandable that politicians, especially in representative democracies where voters might hold them accountable if roll outs are seen as too slow, would want to reserve vaccines for their own populations, it’s both shortsighted and cruel to put richer countries, most of whom have been able to provide for their citizens throughout the crisis, at the front of the line for the shots.

For
its part, Canada’s
government has said it might make excess doses available to other
countries after ensuring
that they’re distributed as widely as possible to its citizens.

As the health policy
manager for the NGO Oxfam recently explained, “No one should be
blocked from getting a life-saving vaccine because of the country
they live in or the amount of money in their pocket. But unless
something changes dramatically, billions of people around the world
will not receive a safe and effective vaccine for COVID-19 for years
to come.”

One reason why vaccine hoarding could prove to be short sighted is that the virus that causes COVID-19 has mutated several times that we know of already, meaning there is no guarantee that a new variant resistant to the vaccines might be spawned in places without access if much of the world remains without immunity for too long.

Speculation like this aside,
as a spokesperson for Gavi (Global Alliance for Vaccines and
Immunization), which is partnered with the World Health Organization
in Covax, told Yasmeen Serhan of the Atlantic earlier this month, “A
collective response … doesn’t just make moral sense—it makes
scientific sense. If rich countries monopolize vaccines at the
outset, it will take us a lot longer, and many more people will die,
than if we distribute on a global, equitable basis.”

Terrible things
often happen for what seem like mundane reasons. In the case of
vaccine nationalism, stringent laws in terms of intellectual property
(IP) are still being applied in an unprecedented crisis and the
profits of pharmaceutical companies are being protected by rich
countries at the possible expense of equitable public health
outcomes.

In an earlier
parallel to this, although the manufacture and distribution of
cheap generic drugs has increased over the last few years, for decades, a million people died a year from AIDS in Africa in the name of copyright protection, an ongoing pandemic that’s never really been called what it is.

The legal trappings
around IP protections are in many ways contrary to how science (and
oddly enough, most art) works, not actually spurring progress but in
many cases bringing it to a halt. If scientists need to avoid certain areas of research due to their
ownership, simple logic dictates that promising avenues of inquiry
might be avoided in the name of minimizing the legal risks. In the
case of medical science, this can be a matter of life and death for
large numbers of people.

Most of those who
actually create life saving medical advances like the new mRNA
vaccines being heralded as a way out of our current circumstance are
salaried employees who don’t share in the profits derived from
their labor. In terms of the approved Pfizer and Moderna inoculations
that will provide windfalls for these companies, the basic research
that made them possible was funded by American taxpayers.

As revealed by Scientific American in November, work by a virologist, Dr. Barney
Graham, “…and others at the National Institutes of Health (NIH),
Defense Department and federally funded academic laboratories has
been the essential ingredient in the rapid development of vaccines in
response to COVID-19. The government has poured an additional $10.5
billion into vaccine companies since the pandemic began to accelerate
the delivery of their products.”

As an aside,
although most of the press have been focused on the miracle
represented by vaccines, a number of powerful at risk people who
refused to follow the most basic health recommendations fell ill and
quickly recovered. They include Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and Chris
Christie, who received what appear to be effective but prohibitively
expensive therapeutics while thousands of their fellow citizens
succumb to the disease each day. The outgoing president even promised
to make these treatments available to all before seeming to forget
about the health crisis altogether.

As much as it’s
revealed the weaknesses inherent in the neoliberal free market system
that we’ve always been told is the only rational economic model to
follow, the novel coronavirus has also shown how unsustainable a
culture based on selfishness is in a crisis. Close to home, we see
this most clearly in the large crowds who turn out to protest mask
wearing as if it’s an infringement on their liberty rather than a
minor inconvenience in the name of protecting others.

In terms of vaccine
nationalism, it’s long been easy for the political right and center,
with most of the western press in tow to turn a blind eye to the
AIDS crisis in Africa or the bleeding of countries like Yemen until
now, so there’s no reason to believe that the misery produced by a
continuing pandemic in these and many other off the radar places will
be much of a priority once those in richer countries are able to go back to living the way we did before the crisis.