probablyasocialecologist:

Just this week an exasperated World Health Organisation called for a halt on vaccine boosters in richer countries, pointing out that wealthy nations which have already used up most of the world’s vaccine supply could not think of delivering a third round of shots while so many poor countries have yet to administer a first.

There now exists an unconscionable global gap, which WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has unequivocally labelled “vaccine apartheid”. Some 80 per cent of the 4 billion vaccine doses delivered globally have gone into the arms of those in higher-income countries, which represents less than half of the world’s population. Meanwhile, only 1 per cent of those in low-income countries have been given one dose. In Africa, just 2 per cent of nearly 1.3 billion people have received a first dose. And as wealthy countries pledge to send more doses to the developing world, most people in poor countries will be waiting years to be vaccinated.

What makes this especially painful is that developing world leaders and health inequality campaigners warned that this would happen. They knew that it would be foolish to trust the market to deliver, because that is not how the market works – not even in a global pandemic. Despite receiving unprecedented billions in public funding and being driven by health innovation in the public sphere, drug companies have monopolised vaccine formulas, creating zero-sum scarcity for the world and huge profits for their shareholders. Instead of being accessible to all, vaccines have become a commodity in a competitive market.

Time and again, campaigners describe coming up against a western political class that has drunk the Kool-Aid of free-market solutions and cannot countenance patent waivers. It is at odds with public sentiment: polling from the People’s Vaccine Alliance in May showed 70 per cent public support across G7 countries for the sharing of vaccine recipes and knowhow.