By Randy Alonso Falcón on January 27, 2021
A Henry Reeve Brigade returning to Cuba. Photo: Ariel Ley Royero
“It will not be a worn-out and obsolete world-order that that will be able to save humanity and create the natural and indispensable conditions for decent and worthwhile life on this planet. (…) This is not an ideological question we are dealing with, but rather a question of life or death for the human species.”
Fidel Castro Ruz
January 27, 2001
Solidarity and justice continue to be words that are not in general use, even when catastrophe overtakes to all of us, like a huge universal Titanic. A tiny contagious virus has aroused fear, shook societies and health systems, caused countless reflections about the present and the future, but without achieving a situation in which equality and love for our neighbors has flourished. This week, the number of those infected with COVID-19 has reached 100 million world-wide and there are already more than 2 million people who have died.
“Daily, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening. The pandemic has reminded us that health and economy are related and that we are all in the same boat. The pandemic will not end until it ends everywhere for all”, said WHO General Director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last Monday. The numbers bear out the incontestable truth of his expert evaluation.
The Remedy of Privilege
In spite of numerous calls by the UN and many world leaders to seek a global response to the pandemic, and to make available and share access to the solution for this illness, there has been overwhelming narrow vision and deaf ears. “Science is succeeding but solidarity is failing,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted on January 15. Several vaccines are already available in the world to prevent SARS-CoV-2 virus infection, but access to them is just as marked by inequality as the world in which we live.
To date, 66.33 million doses have been administered, of which 93% have been supplied to those in only 15 countries – United States, China, United Kingdom, Israel, United Arab Emirates, Germany, India, Italy, Turkey, Spain, France, and Russia – according to the Our World In Data analysis platform, based on statistics from Oxford University.
In all of Sub-Saharan Africa, barely 25 vaccine doses have been given in Guinea. Countries with large populations like Nigeria, with 200 million inhabitants, are still waiting for the first vaccine dose to be given.
The same disorganized grab-fest seen at the beginning of the pandemic with ventilators, masks, and protective gowns is repeating itself now with the vaccines with attempts to corner the market, profiteering, and speculation. “An immoral race to the abyss”, as it was termed by the head of the World Health Organization.
The COVAX Fund, created as a global effort to make vaccines accessible to the poorest nations and those with most limited resources, announced that in February it will begin to deliver the first doses (they had initially said in January) while recognizing that this has been limited by the lucrative agreements made by individual nations with the pharmaceutical companies producing the anti-COVID vaccines.
Another handicap has been the high cost of the vaccines that have achieved greatest international approval up to now. As Norwegian expert John-Arne Rottingen stated to the Guardian newspaper, “The difficulty is that we only really have widespread international approval for the marketing of two vaccines – the two mRNA vaccines. The challenge is that one, the Moderna vaccine, is very expensive, and the other, the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, that one was first available and is now being rolled out in Europe is moderately expensive in comparison with others, and requires a super-cold chain.The price and the cold chain makes them not the ideal vaccines for a global vaccine.”
While nations such as India and South Africa request a UN campaign asking the pharmaceutical companies to give up their intellectual property rights in the vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, which would allow other manufacturers located in the Global South to expand production of these medications, countries like the U.S., U.K., and Canada have opposed this initiative. These three wealthy nations have bought or reserved a sufficient number of doses to immunize their populations at least four times over.
The high-income countries represent 16% of the world’s population but they have obtained more than 60% of the vaccine purchased up until now. Some forecasts predict that only 27% of the total population of middle and low income countries will be able to be vaccinated this year. The Duke University Global Health Innovation Center estimates that there will not be sufficient vaccine doses to immunize the world’s population until 2023 at the earliest.
“The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure — and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” stated Dr Gebreyesus with regret.
The Virus of Inequality
Vaccine Nationalism is an exact reflection of an unequal and unjust world in which the few continue to derive huge benefit from wealth, while billions of other have to make do with the left-overs.
This is the “virus of inequality” that OXFAM denounced in their most recent announcement, which demonstrates that the current failed economic system, “allows a super-rich elite to continue accumulating wealth in the middle of the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, while billions of people are confronting huge obstacles to survival.”
While the multi-millionaires saw their fortunes increase by 3.9 trillion dollars between March and December of 2020 – reaching an inconceivable total of 11.95 trillion – the poorest people of the world will need more than a decade to recover from the economic impacts of the crisis, accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Racial differences have also become more profound. In the United States, the most powerful country in the world, if the mortality rates for the white population were the same as for those who are non-white, there would be 22,000 Black and Latinx people who would not have died from the surge of coronavirus. In Brazil, those who descend from the African diaspora have a 40% greater chance of dying from COVID-19, compared to the white population.
One of OXFAM’s conclusions was “it is probable that the pandemic will increase inequality to an extent never before seen.” The World Bank has warned that in the current situation, more than 100 million more people may experience extreme poverty.
The ten richest men in the world saw their net worth increase by 540 billion during the 2020 period of the pandemic. At the head of the list are Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Also included in this group are Bernard Arnault, the French billionaire who owns most of luxury brand portfolio LVMH, Bill Gates, and the head of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg. According to OXFAM, the money accumulated by these magnates would be enough to prevent people from falling into poverty due to the viral pandemic and also to guarantee vaccination for all the people of the world.
A Shining Moral Light in the World
Among so much inequality and indifference, a small island in the Caribbean called Cuba has been able to send thousands of doctors and nurses, in some 50 brigades of the International Medical Contingent Henry Reeve, to more than thirty countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, to collaborate in fighting the deadly illness. The result of their work of medical solidarity has been thousands of lives saved and people recovered from illness in an extremely complex scenario. The human and professional qualities of these sons and daughters of the Cuban people have overcome obstacles of all types and have left a trail of gratitude and affection behind them, along with an example that is recognized by all those who have shared their work and all those who they have cared for.
In this same country – where resources are scarce but trained and educated talent is abundant – they have been able to build an advanced biopharmaceutical industry, that now is prepared to produce 100 million doses of Soberana 02, one of the four vaccines which Cuban scientists have developed. This will suffice for the immunization of the entire Cuban population – it will be one of the first countries to achieve this – and still allow the distribution of 70 million doses to other peoples of the Global South. There are already countries interested in acquiring this, including Vietnam, Iran, Venezuela, Pakistan, and India, as the Director-General of the Finlay Vaccine Institute announced recently.
Researchers of the Finlay Institute worked with countries like Italy and Canada to test the effects of the Soberana 01 vaccine on people who have already had COVID-19 and are in the convalescent phase, but still at risk for possible re-infection.
“We are not a multinational for which financial return is our number one motivating reason. We work the other way around, creating more health, and our returns are a result, never our priority,” Dr Vicente Verez, head of the leading vaccine research center in Cuba, explained last week to the press.
“Our world can get ahead of this virus one way – together. Global solidarity will save lives, protect people, and help us defeat this vicious virus,” the Secretary-General of the UN recently emphasized. Unfortunately, there has been no way to administer the vaccines of solidarity and justice to the rich who control the world.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau