Revoke Patents, Defeat the Pandemic & Deliver Global Justice

Wearing a full protective suit, a woman doctor who leads a group of volunteer medical professionals attending to COVID-19 patients at a community hospital in the Philippines. Credit: UN Women/Louie PacardoBy Benny KuruvillaNEW DELHI, India, Feb 4 2021 (IPS) As the pandemic spills into its second year, the WHO tracker lists eight Covid-19 vaccines already in public use. Several others are awaiting regulatory approval. This is unprecedented in vaccine history and with effective international coordination, it presents the global community with a real chance for both pandemic and economic recovery in 2021. Instead, however, the world is on the brink of a ‘catastrophic moral failure’ on vaccine distribution, to use the words of WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. Countries are mired in a stalemate of ‘vaccine nationalism’, with the rich world having secured contracts to vaccinate their entire populations thrice over by the end of this year, while 85 poor countries will not get vaccine rollouts until early 2023, if at all. This hoarding of vaccines by rich countries for profit constitutes ‘vaccine apartheid’, which not only grants rich countries an unjust privilege but also naively approaches the pandemic as a national or regional problem, despite its obviously global nature. And as a recent study showed, vaccine nationalism could cost rich countries alone USD 4.5 trillion because of its global economic interlinkages. European hypocrisy But even with the ...
Source: IPS Inter Press Service - Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Authors: Tags: Featured Global Headlines Health Human Rights Humanitarian Emergencies Peace TerraViva United Nations Source Type: news