Global vaccine inequality: “A policy decision by the rich countries”

(Editor’s Note: This is an article at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) last December 4, 2021 that we are reprinting here due to its relevance. It gives everyone an insight into how the rich countries continue to discriminate against poor countries, why it is no longer a surprise that the latest COVID-19 variant, ‘Omicron,’ appeared in South Africa and finally, why the West’ constant preaching about “unity,” “human rights,” etcetera, are all exercises in hypocrisy. This article has been edited due to space constraint).

OF the 8.07 billion doses of the multiple COVID vaccines administered, most have gone to wealthy countries.

While around 60-70 percent of adults have been fully vaccinated in North America and Western Europe and many are now receiving their third jab, only 6 percent of people in low-income countries have received even one dose. More than 3.5 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, are waiting for their first dose.

Wealthy countries have received over 16 times more COVID-19 vaccines per person than the poorer nations that rely on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVAX programme. According to analysis carried out by the Financial Times, just 9.3 vaccines have been delivered to low-income countries for every 100 people, of which 7.1 have been delivered through COVAX…

Some of the world’s richest countries will have 1.9 billion doses more than they need, prompting the WHO to issue yet another pathetic call for donations and dose-swapping.

None of this was accidental. In his interview with the Financial Times, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel, replying to those who had criticized Moderna for not doing enough to distribute the vaccine globally, let the cat out of the bag:

“This was mostly a policy decision by the rich countries,” he said. “In the US, we were told we had no choice but to give 60 percent of our output to the US government.”

These same countries, on behalf of Big Pharma and other corporations and financial institutions, rejected waivers of intellectual property rights on vaccine manufacture, while stalling on granting additional manufacturing capacity in low and middle-income countries and greater access to vaccines through increased supply through COVAX…

Without measures to contain the virus and protect lives, the United Nations has estimated that low and middle-income countries will suffer economic losses of $12 trillion through to 2025.

This situation flows inexorably from the operation of the capitalist mode of production and distribution, based on profit maximization by the major corporations and their financiers.

At the World Trade Organization (WTO), the advanced capitalist countries that are home to the handful of giant drug companies that own vaccine patents, whose development was largely publicly funded, acted to bolster their already obscene profiteering…

While US President Joe Biden publicly backed the call to waive patent rights, this was for public consumption. Washington did nothing to address the technicalities involved or confront the pharmaceutical companies…

The imperialist powers have backed the pharmaceutical corporations to the hilt in their refusal to share their technology and know-how and to prevent their vaccines from being donated to certain countries. Even when doses are filled and finished—the final stage of vaccine production—in poorer countries such as South Africa, as in the case of the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine, they are exported to wealthy countries…

The COVAX scheme has missed all its targets, despite begging rich countries to share their vaccines, as a result of vaccine nationalism and profit gouging…

As a result, COVAX has so far only delivered about 582 million doses of an already much reduced annual target of 1.4 billion and now faces the impossible task of delivering the rest by year end.

African Union officials estimate the scheme will deliver just 470 million doses to African countries by the end of December, less than a quarter of the 2 billion needed to deliver two shots to its entire adult population. WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti said, “At this rate, the continent may only reach the 40 percent target by the end of March 2022…”

The major powers are using vaccines as an instrument of “soft power” in pursuit of their geostrategic interests. US President Joe Biden announced at a COVID conference held on the sidelines of the opening session of the UN General assembly in September that the US would donate an additional 500 million of the Pfizer vaccines to low and middle-income countries, bringing America’s total global donation to more than 1.1 billion doses.

This was widely seen as an effort to shore up Washington’s position after China’s announcement the previous week that it had delivered 1.1 billion vaccine doses to more than a hundred countries…

As all evidence shows, any appeals to the ruling elites to combat vaccine inequality, let alone eliminate the virus, are doomed to fail.

A science-based coronavirus policy that puts lives before profits requires the seizure of the assets of the pharmaceutical and other major corporations and their financiers to pay for the necessary measures to eliminate the virus…

This will only be possible when the working class takes the struggle into its own hands. To achieve this, it is necessary to build the International Committee of the Fourth International to lead that struggle and to publicize its initiative, the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC).