The United States must address the economic injustice of global vaccine inequity.
When examining the statistics on the percentage of people who received just one dose around the world, you would see the lowest numbers in the continent of Africa. Because of its lack of infrastructure and capital, exacerbated by years of instability and exploitation, Africa is behind the rest of the world in getting its population vaccinated. With a new variant that is more evolved, the United States and the other wealthiest nations must passionately construct and abide by a human-centered strategy to get Africans vaccinated.
However, there is a major roadblock to this foreign policy vision - the inherent nature of capitalism itself. Through the global capitalist economy with its pharmaceutical actors - Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Moderna, etc. - have launched the largest vaccination campaign in history, administering more than 7.86 billion doses across the world, most of these vaccines are concentrated in the more wealthier nations. Thus, a public health hierarchy is formed in which wealthy nations are the first in line to purchase vaccines several times over and the poorer nations are getting barely enough to vaccinate five percent of their populations.
The object that is preventing a more equal distribution of vaccines is the patent system. Intellectual property rights are a tool for pharmaceutical companies to ensure that their individual vaccines are legally theirs and that they have the right to profit off the manufacturing and selling of those vaccines. Because of this, Moderna and Pfizer have made $17.2 billion for their vaccines in the first half of the year. In order to gain more profit, companies like Moderna are rushing to sell vaccines almost exclusively to wealthy nations who have the money to purchase them. The race to get the world vaccinated is essentially a race to make more money instead of a race to serve the common good.
In order to make more profits and be dominant in the markets, pharmaceutical companies hoard vaccine patents and have argued against any efforts for them to share knowledge to foreign countries, companies abroad, and even the United States government. The profit-driven nature of our public health system shows that there are those who prioritize their financial well-being over the health and care of the disadvantaged billions. While in the United States where Americans have the privilege of getting two vaccines and a booster shot and where a large portion of those same Americans are choosing not to get those vaccines, there are those in Africa who plead to the United Nations to get a fraction of the vaccines that we have. In the grand scheme of things, it is judicious to agree with Namibian President Hage Geingob’s claim that the current vaccine inequity situation is “vaccine aparetheid.”
As the richest nation in the world and the nation with the largest pharmaceutical market, it is our obligation to not only ensure that patents are waivered, but also ensure that developing nations can get the capital, vaccines, technologies, and resources to challenge disease now and in the future.
What should be proposed as a strategy for the long term is, in essence, a second “Marshall Plan” that is much more grandiose and influential than the first. With the same objective as that of the first, this plan should focus on closing the wealth and resource gap between developed and developing nations, ensuring that these developing countries have the public health infrastructure and economic cooperation to be prepared to contain and, if possible, eradicate present and future disease. In this plan, the United States and other advanced economies should dedicate at least one percent of GDP to foreign aid and force companies to work with the government to dedicate a significant portion of vaccine supply to African nations. With these resources, the United States must be active with African nations in the development of hospitals and healthcare facilities, the hiring of doctors and nurses, and buildup of a vaccine manufacturing sector.
Why should the United States dedicate large amounts of time, care, and resources for countries across the Atlantic? Because in a world of uncertainty, it is certain that humanity’s greatest evils are poverty, disease, and chaos which will come if the pandemic is not alleviated by our efforts. In the words of George Marshall, “it is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
Comments