Vaccine Inequity: More Than An Anti-Vax Movement

On November 29th, the World Health Organization recognized a new COVID-19 variant that had been discovered by South African researchers earlier that month. After the announcement, several high-income countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., implemented widespread South African travel bans, even though the Omicron variant had been recorded in Belgium, Israel, and Hong Kong around the same time that the variant appeared in South Africa.

These bans restricted the foreign travel of citizens from eight different South African countries, whether they had documented cases of the Omicron variant or not. While claiming that the travel bans were implemented “out of an abundance of caution,” according to NBC, the US still permits American travel in and out of the impacted countries, allowing the spread of the variant and undermining the intentions of the ban. As high-income countries are pushing for a booster shot, the discourse surrounding global vaccine inequity obscures the suffering of those in the Global South and ignores the history of colonialism that caused it.

In high-income countries, vaccine inequity has been framed as a local issue affecting those who are willfully unvaccinated. Peter Drobac, an Oxford University infectious-disease, and global health expert claimed in a CNN interview that the pandemic “feels like more than a health crisis, it feels like a social crisis” and pinned the rising number of COVID-19 cases on a “large pocket of resistance to vaccination … these people feel like their freedoms are being compromised.”

However, globally, the disparities in vaccination rates are not confined to high-income countries. A United Nations press release in April of this year discussed how “the number of doses administered in low-income countries stands at 0.2 percent of the population, compared to … 48.7 percent in high-income ones.” This has been attributed to the fact that high-income countries have spent the past year hoarding vaccines and their respective components, and according to a Brookings Institute study, “by the end of the year, the U.S. vaccine surplus is estimated to be over 1 billion doses.”

High-income countries claim to support efforts to redistribute surplus vaccines, with President Biden going so far as to shame other countries for not “match[ing] America’s speed and generosity” in pledging vaccines. But, the countries’ claims fall short of reality. COVAX, the “vaccines pillar of the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator,” according to WHO, serves as a global donation service of vaccines and vaccine components set up to mitigate the exact sort of vaccine nationalism currently exhibited by high-income countries. However, according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “[COVAX] has not been able to compete with HICs on the global market, which have already purchased a huge portion of the available supply of approved vaccines. Despite joining COVAX, many HICs established their bilateral agreements with vaccine manufacturers … [and] to date these donations do not approach the scale of what is needed.”

This has resulted in low-income countries being shut out of efforts to distribute vaccines. Discussions about liberalizing patented components and advancing infrastructure in low-income countries have been widely dismissed in high-income countries. According to the Washington Post, many pharmaceutical industry officials have argued that “foreign manufacturers don’t have the technical competence to produce cutting-edge vaccines,” even though nations within the Global South have repeatedly demonstrated advancement at the same rate of vaccine development in high-income countries.

Now, with these irrational travel bans, it begs the question: why do these countries continue to restrict African citizens’ rights to autonomy and healthcare? Rosebell Kagumire from Aljazeera claims that this is an aspect of coloniality, that these “knee jerk responses … go way back to colonial times and reflect twisted perceptions and marginalization of Africa and Africans.” As Dr. Albert Ponce, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Diablo Valley College, explained, “conceptually, coloniality refers to ‘long standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations.’” The longstanding effects of colonialism on colonized countries, like those impacted by the travel bans, include the belief that colonized countries are incapable of taking care of themselves. This results in actions that keep these countries impoverished and, in this instance, interfere with global health security.

If we are to address global vaccine inequity, these colonial mindsets must be forgone in favor of the solidarity and urgency that was present during vaccine development this past year. In the United States, direct action should be taken to remove travel bans and, according to the Washington Post, President Biden should declare the pandemic a threat to national security, which “would allow the president—under the Defense Production Act, or DPA—both to order vaccine manufacturers to increase their capacities domestically and to enter into technology-sharing agreements with companies abroad.” On a larger scale, COVAX, despite its initial setbacks, is a good start, and resources need to be donated and redistributed by high-income countries as soon as possible to adequately reach the goals the initiative has set for itself. This involves liberalizing patented vaccine production knowledge, facilitating the export of vaccine components to finish and fill facilities in Africa and beyond, and continuing research into next-generation COVID-19 vaccines.

Ultimately, the trajectory of the pandemic rests on how well high-income countries support their global community, including low-income and historically colonized countries like South Africa, as, according to Kagumire, “this pandemic, like other global health challenges, feeds on inequality … [and] you cannot impose rigid policies or build high enough walls to keep the consequences of vaccine inequality out.”

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