Vaccine inequity is the global injustice, caused by the present world economic system which is based on the interests of global giant corporations. About 7.7 billion doses have been administered to people across the world. Yet, the vaccination rates in poor countries, mainly in Africa and Asia, are very low. Until the last week of November 2021, rich countries across the world procured over seven billion vaccine doses. But, poor and low-income countries have procured only about 300 million doses. While many Asian countries were struggling even to get 25% of their people to be fully vaccinated, more than 60% of the people in advanced countries in North America and Europe got fully vaccinated. The World Health Organization stated that for every 100 people in the rich countries, 133 doses have been administered; only four doses per 100 people have been administered in the low-income and poor developing countries.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA), a coalition campaigning for wider access to COVID vaccines, showed that the big corporate companies have been selling the majority of their doses to rich countries while the low-income countries are suffering due to inadequate doses. They estimated that about 98% of the people in low-income countries have not been fully vaccinated. Pfizer and BioNTech have supplied less than 1% of their total supplies to low-income countries and Moderna has supplied just 0.2%.
The Alliance calculated that these three giant corporations would get pre-tax profits of $34 billion in 2021 and worked out that they are getting over $1,000 a second, $65,000 a minute, or $93.5 million a day.
Amnesty International condemned Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer for its false statements about its commitment to vaccine fairness since it continued to supply the majority of its COVID-19 doses to wealthy nations. In November 2021, Patrick Wilcken, Amnesty International’s Head of Business and Human Rights, said: “We’re still in the middle of an unprecedented global health and human rights crisis and it is essential that all countries of the world have access to vaccines as soon as possible. Pfizer says it is committed to supplying doses to low and middle-income countries, but the numbers just don’t bear this out. The fact is that this company is still putting profits first.”
Another facet of this corporate looting was that they have received public funding of more than $8 billion. But they summarily rejected the calls for transferring vaccine technology to producers in low- and middle-income countries. If poor countries have the capacity to produce vaccines, that would increase the global supply, lower the prices and save millions of lives. It is needless to say, for big corporate, reaping super-profits was more important than peoples’ lives.
The patent protection on vaccine recipes is an important hurdle for achieving vaccine equity and thereby endangering millions of lives around the world. The advanced countries including the European Union are blocking the WTO’s proposal for waiving the patent protections on vaccines. Although the US is claiming to support such measures, its support for profiteering corporations like Pfizer and Moderna, is well-known.
Many of Asia’s poor countries were left at the mercy of pharmaceutical corporations. In Myanmar, there is serious internal conflict and its economy is in a downturn. Added to these woes, the full vaccination rate was less than 20%. In the Philippines, only 31% of people have been fully vaccinated, Indonesia has fully vaccinated 33% of its population and Thailand reached 54%.
The people of developing countries are living at high risk of contracting and transmitting COVID-19. This vulnerable situation has provided for the possibility of the development of new variants. And, some variants would be resistant to the currently available vaccines. Currently, the emergence of the Omicron variant of coronavirus is threatening the world. It reflected the urgent need for vaccine equity. The occurrence of variants could not be avoided. However, if the majority of the global population were unvaccinated, it would definitely create conditions for the emergence of new variants.
The specter of a renewed pandemic, the emergence of the omicron variant of the COVID-19, is threatening the Asian countries. Many countries in the region, with half of their population with at least one dose of vaccine, are recording the uncontrolled transmission of the variant. Accelerating booster programs in rich countries will further intensify the global vaccine inequality, which was the cause for the rise of the new variant in southern Africa. Saying that omicron could not be dismissed as mild, WHO director Tedros said: “The sheer number of cases could once again overwhelm unprepared health systems,” It is obvious that the Asia’s underdeveloped countries are still struggling to set up the viable health infrastructures to address the new variants.
Recently, the daily case numbers are steadily increasing in India. Amid rising numbers of new cases, several Indian provinces announced curbs and restrictions to prevent the transmission of the new variant. In this context, it is heartening that a new COVID-19 vaccine, CORBEVAX™, an open-license vaccine named as “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine” by its developers at Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine, which is offered patent-free to vaccine manufacturers. Already, the technology has been transferred to vaccine producers in India, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Botswana. India authorized its use as production would rise up to over 100 million doses per month.
Detection of the new variant, Omicron is a cause for concern for poor countries. The World Health Organization appealed to countries in South-East Asia Region to “scale up surveillance, strengthen public health and social measures, and enhance vaccination coverage.”Only 42.2% of the region’s population is fully vaccinated; about a billion people are yet to receive even a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. They are at risk of contracting severe disease due to the virus and spreading it further.
Some of the advanced nations hold hundreds of millions of excess vaccine doses at risk of expiring. Such states should redistribute the hundreds of millions of surplus vaccines currently in their stocks. Vaccine inequity is a gross injustice to the vast majority of the global population and it would be redressed only through global resistance of working people.
N. Gunasekaran is a political activist and writer based in Chennai, India.
From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2022
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