Vaccine debate ignores inequities

There is great angst abroad in the land.

Our Pfizer vaccine supply has been interrupted and, if that’s not evidence enough of the federal government’s incompetence, how about the fact that other countries are getting people vaccinated faster than Canada.

While the angst is understandable, particularly where the COVID-19 virus is rampant — in most of Canada, save our East Coast sanctuary and parts of the north — the above narrative turns a blind eye to the big picture and reflects the self-interest that pervades the privileged, developed world.

Earlier this week, the House of Commons held an emergency debate on the interruption or more accurately, the delay in vaccine delivery and at some point an opposition MP almost certainly noted that Israel, the U.A.E., Britain, the U.S.A. and about 14 other nations are beating Canada in the vaccination race.

To drive the point home, it might well have been said that nations, somehow deemed lesser than Canada — like Malta, Iceland and Serbia — are also getting more shots in more arms more quickly than we are. (The Parliamentary debate began at 7:30 p.m. Atlantic, so past my deadline, if not my bedtime.)

Absent from the great Canadian bun toss over our place in the global vaccine pecking order is the first principle we heard when this whole thing began a year ago: “We are all in this together.”

Where it is expressed at all in Canada, like elsewhere in the wealthy world, that principle is invariable framed in the national or even subnational context.

But COVID-19 is a global pandemic which tells me that the appropriate context is the global context.

Surely, when all parts of the world are grappling with the coronavirus, with varying degrees of success, “we’re all in this together” ought to refer to everyone everywhere.

But it doesn’t, does it? Like the rest of the wealthy world, Canada will do its part to help get vaccines to the people and places across the globe that are inevitably, and invariably, last in line.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau regularly touts Canada’s contribution of COVAX, the co-operative international effort to deliver vaccines and other essential COVID-related medical supplies to impoverished people in impoverished nations.

But the humanitarian effort is down the priority list. It comes below the imperative that every Canadian who wants a vaccine will get one by the end of September, as per the oft-repeated promise from Ottawa.

The federal government has, is and will continue to use Canada’s considerable wealth — relative to the rest of the world — and it’s much less considerable geopolitical clout, to keep the vaccine flowing, it hopes, at a rate necessary to achieve the national objective.

A lesser effort would be seen as a dereliction of duty and would be politically fatal.

As of Tuesday, the coronavirus vaccine tracker on Our World Data showed Canada’s vaccination rate at 2.2 per cent, behind the nations mentioned above and a few others, but ahead of France, Germany and, of course, well ahead of undeveloped, impoverished countries around the world.

Indeed, worldwide the vaccination rate is about 0.9 per cent and, with developed nations at two per cent or above, the vaccination rate elsewhere — including the world’s poorest nations — is obviously much lower and dragging down the average.

Add to that obvious inequity, the accepted target to vaccinate 20 per cent of the population of COVAX-recipient nations — the poorest of nations — by 2021’s end.

Show me a Canadian politician who says that a vaccination rate of 20 per cent by year’s end is good enough for Canada and I’ll show you a politician whose career is over. Yet, 20 per cent is good enough for the most disadvantaged people on Earth.

No one will be surprised — and few, if any, alarmed — that the wealthy nations of the world will ensure their citizens get preferential access to vaccines, ahead of people in impoverished, Third World nations.

But let’s drop any pretext of global equity. The vaccine will be distributed worldwide roughly in proportion to the worldwide distribution of wealth and power.

As for the big picture, expressed in the idea that “no one is safe, until everyone is safe,” while we accept the notion, we most certainly will not accept a global vaccine rollout consistent with it. To do so would allow others — people from nations much poorer than our own — ahead of us in the vaccination line.

We keep hearing that COVID-19 has exposed inequities in Canadian society. Those inequities were there — already exposed to all who thought to look — long before the pandemic arrived.

The global vaccination program won’t expose new inequities, either. It will merely reinforce and exacerbate the existing ones.