Virus and moral failure

Thursday 21st January 2021

The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure, World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has warned, at a recent WHO Executive Board meeting, adding that more than 39 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered in about 49 high-income countries while only 25 doses have been administered in one lowest-income country. We believe that the catastrophic moral failure has already set in. The WHO chief is right in insisting that equitable access to vaccines is not only a moral imperative but also an economic and strategic imperative, and failure to ensure it will only lead to the prolongation of the pandemic. However, he has not mentioned that not a single dose of vaccine has been administered in most countries, Sri Lanka being one of them.

Ghebreyesus has not named the lowest-income country where only 25 doses of the vaccines have so far been administered. It must be in the African continent if one hazards a guess by using GDP per capita as a yardstick. Paradoxically, the African countries are the richest in the world in terms of the value of their mineral deposits and other natural resources. They remain poor due to the plunder of their resources, which find their way into the West. The African nations have the world’s largest amount of gold, but this fact is not reflected in their currencies which are amongst the weakest in the world. Industries and banks in the developed world are heavily dependent on the exploitation of resources in Africa and funds generated therefrom. If the illegal trade of diamonds, gold, coltan, etc., is stopped, many corporations and banks in the West will go belly up. Exploiters are having the first dibs on the vaccine, and their victims have been left to their fate.

Meanwhile, one interesting aspect of the current global health emergency is that it has brought about a situation where the people of the Global North have become guinea pigs for Big Pharma. Time was when their counterparts in the developing world were used as experimental groups. It may be recalled that Pfizer had to pay millions of US dollars as compensation to the parents of a group of Nigerian children who died due of one of its drug trials. Today’s controversy over Pfizer products is reported from the developed world; in Norway, 29 elderly people have died after receiving the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

Given this situation, the Sri Lankan government, which is trying to procure the COVID-19 vaccines from several sources, had better heed the opinion of the Vaccine and Infectious Diseases Forum (VIDF) of Sri Lanka, consisting of reputed medical experts, if disaster is to be averted. The VIDF has said in a media statement: “With the current dilemma of vaccine efficacy and safety issues and the uncertainty of the claims made by individual vaccine manufacturers, we fully understand the need to strictly apply the standard procedure of approval of any medicinal product in this country for approving a vaccine for COVID-19 in Sri Lanka too and wish to endorse the need for our regulatory authorities to act accordingly.” (See page five for the VIDF statement.)

The developed world is promoting human rights globally and resorts to punitive action such as sanctions to make others respect and protect them. The right to life takes precedence over everything else. Humans are faced with an existential problem due to the pandemic, which snuffs out thousands of lives daily. It is, therefore, up to the nations that have taken upon themselves the task of protecting human rights to practise what they preach, and help save lives by ensuring equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine across the world.

It is hoped that the absence of equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines and the developed world’s inoculation frenzy at the expense of a vast majority of the global population will be taken up at the upcoming UNHRC sessions in Geneva. What we are witnessing is discrimination against the poor on a global scale. It could even be considered a form of apartheid. The outspoken WHO Chief should be invited to address the UNHRC so that there will be at least one useful item on the outfit’s agenda, which reeks with prejudice and duplicity.