One thing the Liberals did right on vaccines
If the Liberal government manages to survive the early stalling of Canada’s vaccine rollout, it’s bound to be because Canadian voters still trust the opposition parties less. And we citizens can’t just go take video footage of the counterfactual universe in which erin O’toole or Jagmeet Singh were in charge when the novel coronavirus appeared. but surely these alternative candidate governments could at least tone down criticisms of the Liberals when they get one thing inarguably right — as they have done, in tapping into Canada’s reserved supplies of vaccine under the international COVAX initiative.
The main goal of COVAX, created last April, was to get rich countries to pay very early for vaccines in order to provide a guaranteed supply of capital for vaccine development and manufacture. This could already be considered a favour to the wider world even if none of the vaccines had actually been set aside for poorer countries — but rich COVAX participants like Canada signed up on a 50/50 plan; for every dose of vaccine we buy for ourselves, we buy a second one for the world’s hundred or so poorest states. We put close to half a billion dollars into the program. The u.s. and russia opted out altogether, which will spare their political leaders some static.
Canada has now asked COVAX to deliver 1.9 million doses of the (as yet domestically unapproved) Oxford-astrazeneca vaccine before the end of June. The opposition parties all think this is just terrible. In the House of Commons on Thursday, the bloc Québécois’s Julie Vignola complained that “It is not right for a G7 country to be on the COVAX list, a list that is meant to help disadvantaged countries get access to vaccines.” The simple answer to this would seem to be “We have helped.” Would it have been better to not be part of COVAX?
Member after member stepped up to repeat Vignola’s criticism. The Ndp’s Heather Mcpherson moaned that taking part of our half of what we actually paid for is “a terrible global economic decision.” Alain Therrien of the bq complained of “dipping into the COVAX program, which is intended for the poorest countries ... and that is extremely embarrassing.” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh repeated this almost word-forword.
And the Conservative’s Pierre Paul-hus said “I am not proud to be forced to put my hand in the COVAX cookie jar to solve Canada’s problems.” I suppose a cookie jar is the last place some people would look for a cookie, even if they were about to lapse into a diabetic coma.
The Greens’ MP elizabeth May did not join the chorus: being a very serious parliamentarian, she used her question time to ask why Canada is “not celebrating” the biden presidency more vigorously. but never fear: outside the House, Green leader Annamie Paul was making the same criticisms as the other parties, actually recommending that Canada “make up for whatever doses it has taken out by returning them to the COVAX facility.”
Finance minister Chrystia Freeland and other Liberal colleagues patiently explained, with every question, that COVAX is working just as it was intended to work. They might have added that the COVID-19 pandemic is mostly hitting wealthy countries like Canada a lot harder than it is hitting the poor ones. Some Central and South American countries have been worse off than us in overall death rates, and some of those will probably end up benefiting from our COVAX self-matching donation. (On the other hand, Argentina is one of those countries, and their vaccination rate is a smidgen ahead of ours right now.)
There are in fact few truly poor countries who have suffered mortality anything like Canada’s. China, of course, claims to have had almost no deaths, owing to extremely aggressive lockdown measures. India’s COVID-19 death rate is about a fifth of ours. Pakistan’s is more like a tenth. Nigeria’s is roughly one sixty-sixth. Of course the SARS-COV-2 virus should be suppressed everywhere in concert once vaccines are being manufactured in billions rather than dribs and drabs. If you’ve thought things through that far, congratulations: you’re on the verge of reinventing the COVAX program a year after the real thing was devised.
but in this acute phase of the pandemic, lazy assumptions about how the Third World might fare have been flipped firmly upside-down. For better or worse this virus targets rich countries at high latitudes with older, fatter populations. Places that don’t have winter appear to have a big advantage. So, yeah, we’re the ones who need immediate help. everybody, including the Conservatives, can put down the tattered old global-inequality songsheet and cram both hands into that cookie jar.
WOULD IT HAVE BEEN BETTER TO NOT BE PART OF COVAX?