Prisoners in a make believe world
Since the revelations beginning with those made by the Ethiopian-born biologist Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who heads the World Health Organization (WHO), on the shocking imbalance between rich and poor countries, in terms of the distribution of coronavirus vaccines, the issue had more or less ‘gone to ground’ until just over a week ago when the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in its role as a member of a Task Force that includes the heads of companies involved in vaccine production and other high profile international organisations, met to, among other things, review the state of affairs in the matter of the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines.
The picture, as reflected in an IMF media release following the meeting of the Task Force, is a deeply disturbing one. Put bluntly and based on what the IMF says in its release, the situation is not just grim in terms of the likely consequences of literally starving some poor countries of adequate quantities of the vaccination but downright scandalous in terms of the ‘one world’ axiom that is customarily paraded as a kind of fulcrum of international relations.
Some of the blatant truths about the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccinations have got to be spelt out in order to bring about a full understanding of its absurdity. We learnt from what the IMF has had to say in its media release that having, it seems, completed, their domestic COVID-19 vaccination duties, ‘rich countries’ and determining which countries those are requires no certification in rocket science - are, as of now, still holding on to two billion doses in circumstances where those could, today, be put to immediate use in countries where millions of people remain unvaccinated. But that is not all. While governments in poor countries have been agonizing over first-dose vaccinations for millions of people, those rich nations that ‘call the shots’ globally are signing contracts with vaccine manufacturers to further consolidate their already ample stocks.
The plain truth here - and there is really no other way of putting it - is that when, as we say in Guyana, ‘push comes to shove,’ the response of rich countries to the COVID-19 circumstance underscores the fact that ours is a reality not of ‘one world’ but decidedly different worlds, a well-appointed half and an expendable half. Perhaps the more relevant point here reposes in the paradox pressed upon us in the theatre of international relations, a one-world chimera that is no more real than the man in the moon.
All of this, interestingly, is being played out at this time in the ‘one world’ theatre of the United Nations where the haves and the have-nots are
being afforded that once-a-year high profile opportunity to rub shoulders in a theatrical display that does no more than bear witness to our theatre of illusions.
Here, the question arises as to just when poor countries, the hungry half, will wake up to the reality that the one-world notion has become the centrepiece that underpins our hopelessly flawed understanding of just how the world works. When do we stop dwelling in the prison on a make believe world?