About nine out of 10 people in 70 low-income countries are unlikely to be vaccinated against Covid-19 next year.  For anyone familiar with how the world works in these times of gross inequality and injustice, the reasons for this are not surprising. 

It is because some 53% of the most promising vaccines now coming on stream have been bought up (and are even being held in storage) by the West.  The world’s richest countries contain approximately 14% of the world’s population yet have priority access to 53% of the vaccine.  A full 96% of the Pfizer/BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine administered in the last few days in the UK has been bought by the West.  

The prices of the emerging vaccines are high and access for low-income countries is further complicated by the significantly low temperatures at which they need to be stored.

In contrast, the problematic Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine remains stable at normal fridge temperatures and the price has been set deliberately low to ensure global access. When available, 64% of its doses will go to people in the developing world but this will only reach 18% of the world’s population next year at best.

These realities have been exposed by the People’s Vaccine Alliance which includes NGOs such as Amnesty International, Global Justice Now and Oxfam as well as UNAIDS and an international network of involved individuals. 

Just as was apparent when the pandemic first assailed us, the structures of inequality and discrimination that plague our world ensured that those already privileged would fare better than those marginalised and vulnerable, so too would be the reality when an end beckons.  Sadly, no big surprise there.

A good share of AstraZeneca's vaccine will go to poorer countries, but this will only reach a small share of the world's population. Photo: AFP

Unless the situation changes dramatically, billions of people around the world will not get access to a safe and effective vaccine for Covid-19 for years.  This rotten reality puts them and everyone else at risk. The deep social fault lines of injustice in society are once again revealed in all their ugliness.

Campaigners for a People’s Vaccine argue that manufacturers should share their technology and intellectual property through the World Health Organisation as this would allow billions more doses to be made at low prices for all and not just the privileged.     

This argument is even more compelling when we realise that all three major vaccine development and manufacturing companies have received more than US$5bn of public funding.  This clearly implies public obligation. 

The situation is compounded further by a narrow and counterproductive nationalism that has spread with the virus.  Initially we witnessed a constant stream of invective and abuse towards ‘foreigners’ – the supposed carriers of the virus.  Now we are witnessing a widespread reaction across states as they withdraw into themselves with a concurrent scepticism or rejection of internationalism. 

As before this type of nationalism and its associated isolationism (pre-eminently evident in Trump’s appalling agenda) are precisely the reactions that do little or nothing in a global campaign against a pandemic.  Pandemics and their consequences cannot be overcome country by country with empty posturing and rhetoric. 

What is required is enhanced international solidarity, not its opposite. 

The epidemic itself and its resulting crises in health, economic and public well-being are global problems.  No one country alone can resolve the challenge no matter how powerful it or its leaders believe it to be.  The pandemic demands, above all is real adult leadership. 

Instead, we are offered tired old cliches and hollow soundbites from politicians and demagogues who never take responsibility, who never admit mistakes and who daily take all the credit leaving the work as well as the blame for others.

There is another possibility offered by the pandemic and that is to realise and reject virus and vaccine nationalism and isolationism.  As so often, we have choices to make.  Nationalism or internationalism, science or scepticism, us or them.  As ever, our responses to those choices tell us so much about ourselves.