Last week I was involved in an education workshop on using political cartoons to explore pressing topics such as climate change, human rights, and equality. During the workshop, an experienced teacher from Cork offered a telling comment.
He said that many of his students found it difficult to relate to world hunger and inequality precisely because the issue has been with us for so long. Hunger in its ‘modern’ form existed when they were born, so its causes and inner workings seem distant and even abstract.
Its roots in structural inequality and managed poverty remained hard for them to grasp.
Not so, he argued with COVID-19, where the world’s response clearly demonstrates in real-time how inequality is being actively reinforced. The students can see it happening before their very eyes.
The mechanisms, policies and outcomes are clearly public and visible.
The countries of the EU, along with the UK, Canada, Japan, and South Korea have in effect supported a policy of denying an effective vaccination programme for the world’s poorest - a policy that also includes the hoarding of vaccines.
This reality has further compounded existing structural weaknesses in developing country health systems after years of neglect and underinvestment. Poverty, underfunding, staff shortages, weak infrastructure and vaccine hesitancy compound the situation.
One year ago, South Africa, India and other low- and middle-income states called for a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights so that vaccines and related products could be produced by more countries. That would have meant an end to the effective monopoly that a very limited number of pharmaceutical companies have on the cost, production, and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
The waiver was blocked and continues to be blocked by rich countries, including a majority of EU and European states. Since the waiver was first proposed, just 7% of those in low-income countries have been vaccinated, with a conservative estimate of at least four million deaths resulting. Some researchers place the figure as high as 12 million.
Additionally, in April 2021 the WHO set up a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology transfer structure to speed up vaccine manufacture. Incredibly, each of the three relevant vaccine manufacturers refused to take part - and were even defended for doing so.
The workings of COVID apartheid are graphically highlighted by some simple math.
In high and upper-middle-income countries, 69% of adults are fully vaccinated. In lower-middle-income and low-income countries, it is 30% and 3.5%.
As a result, millions of people will die from COVID-19 in the years ahead and the majority of those will be unvaccinated. The current system of vaccine production and distribution, created at breakneck speed in the last two years (largely researched and developed by government scientists trained and paid by taxpayers), is simply not working.
Currently, the international price for per dose vaccines varies from $2 (AstraZeneca) to $37 (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna being the most expensive). In the period January 2020 to December 2021 the market trading value of Moderna rose from $6.9bn to $134bn; that of Pfizer from $206bn to $314bn and of BioNTech from $6.6bn to $84bn. Stocks continue to boom.
COVAX, the international vaccine distribution scheme, set a target of delivering two billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021. It has failed to deliver even 30%, due to its own inefficiencies and the failure of western leaders to deliver on hyped promises. This is not a mechanical failure; it is the direct result of political and ‘business’ decisions.
It demonstrates calculated inequality over a two-to-three-year period. As such it is indefensible.
The situation is self-evidently unjust and extremely cruel. It is also immensely short-sighted. If only the world’s rich are vaccinated, the virus (including new variants) will have free rein worldwide.
Meanwhile, the world’s privileged continue to get jabbed multiple times over, while needlessly resisting similar opportunities for the less privileged. We continue to ignore what is morally obvious, we allow millions to suffer and die needlessly from both COVID -19 and hunger while simultaneously pleading ignorance (‘I didn’t realise’) or innocence (‘there’s nothing I can do’).
As I write this, news breaks that in the coming three months, Europe will get an additional 20 million vaccines and a total of 650 million in 2022.
A real-time case study in manufactured inequality.