Thabisle Khlatshwayo, receives her second shot at a vaccine trial facility for AstraZeneca at Soweto’s Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa, on Nov. 30. With Americans, Britons and Canadians rolling up their sleeves to receive coronavirus vaccines, the route out of the pandemic now seems clear to many in the West, even if the rollout will take many months. But for poorer countries, the road will be far longer and rougher.
COVID-19 vaccines should be shared much more equitably, in solidarity, around the world
The world currently faces a sharp and highly problematic vaccine divide in which the much richer Global North states, which host a very small percentage of the global population, have so far cornered the vast majority of available COVID-19 vaccines, leaving the bulk of the world’s population with almost no access to these medicines.
Thabisle Khlatshwayo, receives her second shot at a vaccine trial facility for AstraZeneca at Soweto’s Chris Sani Baragwanath Hospital outside Johannesburg, South Africa, on Nov. 30. With Americans, Britons and Canadians rolling up their sleeves to receive coronavirus vaccines, the route out of the pandemic now seems clear to many in the West, even if the rollout will take many months. But for poorer countries, the road will be far longer and rougher.
The last few weeks of 2020 witnessed the historic approval of three COVID-19 vaccines by regulators in various countries, offering much hope to billions of people worldwide. Several states, mostly in the Global North, have already secured large quantities of the approved vaccines and commenced vaccinating their populations.
Unfortunately, this has not been the case in almost all of the Global South states, in which close to 90 per cent of the world’s population lives. Thus, the world currently faces a sharp and highly problematic vaccine divide in which the much richer Global North states, which host a very small percentage of the global population, have so far cornered the vast majority of available COVID-19 vaccines, leaving the bulk of the world’s population with almost no access to these medicines.
Rich states have, quite understandably, acted according to their perceived national self-interest, and under great political pressure from their own populations to rapidly end the pandemic for them. They imagine that the pandemic will end for them once their populations receive these vaccines, regardless of whether the same experience is simultaneously replicated in the poorer states that host the vast majority of the world’s population.
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And yet, as a top diplomat has observed, this pandemic will not end for anyone, until it ends for everyone. As the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr once taught the world in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” “we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.”
Given the continuation of both cross-border trade and significant human traffic around the globe, the virus can still travel from the vastly unvaccinated massive population of the Global South to the Global North, including in its increasingly mutating forms. This would likely bolster or reignite the pandemic, even in states that have vaccinated large swathes of their populations, or otherwise complicate or delay the effort to end it.
In the light of this realization, globally co-ordinated vaccine distribution programs are highly preferable to the individualized approaches adopted by all-too-many of the richer states. International vaccine solidarity should be much preferred over international vaccine competition.
Thus, I strongly commend the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX) led by the World Health Organization. COVAX aims at the global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines by fairly distributing two billion doses by the end of 2021.
Aiming to mitigate the negative effects of vaccine hoarding by the richer states, COVAX member-states have agreed to not “receive enough doses to vaccinate more than 20 per cent of its population until all countries in the financing group have been offered this amount” and to only “request for enough doses to vaccinate between 10-50 per cent of their population” with the exception of “those countries who have opted to receive fewer than 20 per cent.”
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I therefore urge that all states, rather than act separately to hoard vaccines, rededicate themselves to COVAX. While many rich states have commendably contributed large sums of money to COVAX, they undermine its effectiveness, and the overall effort to end the pandemic as rapidly as possible for everyone, when they simultaneously engage in vaccine hoarding.
Since vastly increasing the quantities of manufactured vaccine doses is another factor that will contribute to their more even distribution around the world, any measure that can ensure this outcome deserves serious consideration.
Such a vast increase in the availability of doses can only be brought about in the shortest possible time by the production of generic versions of vaccines by as many companies as possible, without them being unduly constrained by patents. I therefore urge all states to support the application made by South Africa and India to the World Trade Organization for a waiver that would make this possible.
Given the great urgency of ensuring for everyone, everywhere, as rapid and effective access to COVID-19 vaccines as possible, I urge urgent and strong action by states and other actors toward a course correction.
Obiora Chinedu Okafor is the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and International Solidarity and the York Research Chair in International and Transnational Legal Studies at the Osgoode Hall Law School.
