This morning I was on the phone with a friend in a Central American country. We were trying to make plans for future in-person connections.
"You know there's no way I'll be vaccinated before next year?" he asked. The only people from his area who have gotten a coronavirus vaccine have been very rich and powerful or people who have U.S. passports who can travel to get jabbed in Miami. Those are often overlapping categories. Most Central Americans are simply shit out of luck.
In the U.S., we've come to a turning point. Most people who want their shots can get them. For months the lament was vaccine scarcity. Now it's the prevalence of hesitancy.
So it seems time (and probably over time) to begin asking what is the U.S. doing to get the rest of the world vaccinated? How are we using our riches?
STAT has a rundown:
More than two million petitions were sent to the White House in hopes of convincing the Biden administration to support a proposal that would temporarily waive trade agreement provisions in a bid to widen access to Covid-19 vaccines in low and middle-income countries.
The effort was promoted by several U.S. lawmakers and dozens of advocacy groups amid ongoing controversy over the proposal, which was introduced last fall at the World Trade Organization. Since then, however, the effort has stalled amid push back by the pharmaceutical industry and some wealthy nations, including the U.S., over concerns that intellectual property rights will be compromised.
The clash, which remained deadlocked yesterday at yet another WTO council meeting, emerges as Covid-19 has claimed more than 3 million lives worldwide and new variants threaten to make it harder to contain the coronavirus. Meanwhile, low-income countries have received just 0.3% of the nearly 900 million doses that have been administered globally, according to the World Health Organization. ...
“This is an all-hands-on-deck global emergency and it doesn’t make sense to grant pharmaceutical companies monopolies, especially since taxpayers have provided funding” to develop some of the vaccines, said Abby Maxman, who heads the Oxfam America advocacy group that supports free global access to Covid-19 vaccination. “We need to use every tool at our disposal.”
The necessary international arrangements are complicated as all things are in a world of many cultures, much need, and competing power centers.
But the whole world needs vaccines as soon as possible for the sake of us all. The virus doesn't respect borders. And this country should be able to make the pharma compainies give a little -- after all, the U.S. taxpayer paid for much of the research that led to vaccine patents. There are some countries, including hard-pressed India, that could be making vaccines if pharma were forced to loose its death grip.
In the context of a worldwide pandemic, profit from hording "intellectual property" looks like theft from humanity.
2 comments:
What is sad here is the lies that are being spread to scare people away from vaccines. I know many were always anti-vaccers and avoiding doctors but what they claim will scare those who would've had them. One such lie was the vaccine caused a woman's dog to die two days later.
My husband and I are fully covered with two and the extra weeks-- no problems for us or our pets. But that doesn't matter. What matters is the few who claim the vaccine will make them sicker than the virus. A lie and the few who get blood clots probably already had the tendency.
This behavior is a combination of simple greed and clear stupidity. Greed for the short term wealth stupidity for the non comprehension that this virus and others is not limited by any political boundaries. It is on all of our self interests as well as on decency to have everyone on this planet provided equal free access to these vaccines as well as other health services. If your neighbor can not be safe, clean, fed and educated, just how long can you or your children be?
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