Vaccine nationalism and moral failure

Thursday 29th April, 2021

The US has at last decided to send emergency supplies of vaccine raw materials, ventilators, personal protective equipment, etc., to India, which is struggling to contain the pandemic. Curiously, when some Indian vaccine producers, unable to meet their production targets to keep the virus at bay, desperately appealed to the US to lift its export ban on raw materials needed for vaccines, Washington did not accede to their request, citing domestic needs. Its change of heart has come as a surprise.

The US says it is willing to share as many as 60 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine with developing countries. About 10 million doses are expected to be ready within the next few weeks, according to media reports. India is seeking to secure most of them, given the severity of the current wave of infections it is faced with. Although Washington says it needs weeks to share the jabs, there are reports that it already has huge stocks of AstraZeneca vaccine. The New York Times reported, a few weeks ago, that tens of millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccine were ‘sitting idly in US manufacturing facilities awaiting the results of clinical trials’ while the countries that had approved the jab for use were begging for access’.

The global rich are stockpiling vaccines while the poor are dying without them. We are witnessing what the World Health Organization has rightly called ‘vaccine nationalism’, which has stood in the way of a truly global vaccination drive to achieve herd immunity. One may recall that WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned, in January, that the world was on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure and insisted that equitable access to vaccines was not only a moral imperative but also an economic and strategic imperative, and failure to ensure it would only lead to the prolongation of the pandemic. It is time the nations that have huge stocks of vaccines idling in warehouses sent them where they are needed.

The US State Department did not use ‘diplomatese’ when it turned down India’s recent request at issue. It only curtly said the Biden administration’s first obligation was to take care of the requirements of the American people. But why has the US suddenly become amenable to what it refused to do about a week ago?

The reversal of the US decision is apparently due to several reasons; Washington must be feeling guilty that its refusal to comply with the Indian vaccine producers’ appeal has adversely affected India’s efforts to minimise deaths due to Covid-19; the WHO has frowned at Washington; Beijing has offered assistance to New Delhi, which, however, has not responded, and several other countries have already rushed emergency supplies to India.

India, to its credit, generously shared its vaccines with other nations in need, and Sri Lanka has also benefited from its munificence. It deserves unstinted assistance from the international community to curb the spread of the pandemic although its leaders are acting as irresponsibly as their Sri Lankan counterparts, giving priority to electioneering. If medical oxygen generating facilities in Asia step up their production with supplies of the life-saving gas being airlifted to India, it may be possible to save thousands of lives.

Meanwhile, going by the predicament of India, one of the leading vaccine manufacturers in the world, what is in store for the non-vaccine producing countries in the event of the current pandemic situation worsening further, or the world being plagued by a new virus is not difficult to imagine. There are lessons that need to be learnt from the current global health emergency. Every country should be equipped to produce vaccines as far as possible, for scientists have warned of the possibility of viruses far worse than coronavirus troubling humans in the future.

Sri Lanka will have to develop the Medical Research Institute (MRI), which used to produce most vaccines the country needed in the past, to meet future challenges. If the MRI had not been run down after the opening up of the economy in the late 1970s, it would have been able to partner with a foreign counterpart to produce a Covid-19 jab locally. This is something the present-day rulers who wrap themselves in the flag and bellow patriotic rhetoric, while going cap in hand begging for funds and vaccines, should give serious thought to.