Vaccine equity is essential
Until Omicron whacked us, few Nova Scotians knew anybody snared by COVID-19. In the last month, that has certainly changed.
But the rest of the world has been far more troubled by the virus for nearly two years.
Before last Easter, the rural village of Kikima, Kenya got hit. I know because of belonging to the Kings Kikima Grannies locally who support AIDS orphans and their grandmothers in that village.
Our contact Ruth Kyatha, who is an Acadia University graduate, reported, “It is true that the disease is here with us now and we have lost quite a number of people to it, unlike in the first and second waves. People went and became careless and brought it with them from wherever. So, we are in a situation.”
A situation complicated by the fact that in Kenya, like a number of African countries, high schools gather students into a boarding school situation. How easy does that make it for a virus to spread.
Globally, the issue of vaccine inequity is ramping up again. More than 82.5 per cent of Canadians have had their first dose of a COVID19 vaccine, according to our public health agency. That's one of the highest rates in the world. Yet, in low-income countries, only about eight per cent of populations have received at least one dose.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has used as his catchphrase
Former Wolfville resident Ruth Kyatha sits with a group of Kenyan grandmothers at a food distribution in the village of Kikima, Kenya. With the lack of vaccines, many Kenyans are getting sick or dying from COVID.
during the pandemic: “No one is safe until everyone is safe.” But Canada and other rich countries are not making the world safer if the African continent is unvaccinated. We know that's where the Omicron variant mutated.
If we really want to end this pandemic, everyone must be protected. That is why, in the midst of us getting boostered, Wolfville's Jill Davies is trying to spread the word and calling on Valley residents to take part in a letter-writing campaign.
She was already writing letters to newspaper editors, but hearing a Sunday CBC Radio interview with Dr. Madhukar Pai recently, she is now urging letter writing aimed at the prime minister, the federal minister of health and the deputy prime minister.
Davies wrote Pai, who is a professor of epidemiology and global health at McGill University, and heard back indicating the interview had inspired other Canadians to make contact. He provided her with additional background and encouragement.
Pai and Manu Prakash, who is an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University's Center for Innovation in Global Health, wrote an opinion piece published in the British Telegraph newspaper, maintaining that vaccine equity is essential.
“If we do not vaccinate the world, the pandemic won’t end, more variants will emerge, and the world will continue to lose millions of lives, along with trillions in economic losses,” the two experts stated. But it was back in March that Oxfam began urging vaccine equity. It was then that epidemiologists delivered a stark warning about the risk the world takes by failing to ensure all countries have sufficient vaccines to protect people from COVID-19.
The World Health Organization (WHO) indicates that even after a full year of COVID vaccination globally, three out of four African healthcare workers remain unvaccinated. More than 3.3 billion people, mostly in low and middle-income countries, are still waiting for their first vaccine dose.
I understand that some vaccines reaching Africa were not frozen effectively and had to be thrown out. That is a great shame, but to my mind, a bigger one is that multibillionaire Bill Gates proved to be on the side of intellectual property protection rather than allowing more firms to make vaccines.
According to the Toronto Star, back in 2020, Gates looked to support a ‘people’s vaccine,’ but then he derailed the notion in favour of the patent holders many like to call Big Pharma.
No wonder WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a press conference, “I will not stay silent when the companies and countries that control the global supply of vaccines think the world’s poor should be satisfied with leftovers.”
In December, reports were that Britain, the European Union and the United States had received more doses of vaccine in six weeks at the end of the year than African countries had all year, according to analysis from the People’s Vaccine Alliance (PVA). That news prompted former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown to call the state of the rollout “a stain on our soul.”
Aid organizations pushed Moderna and Pfizer to share their vaccine technology and for countries to distribute urgently needed vaccines to poorer nations. PVA is an Amnesty Internationalbacked coalition consisting of groups like Human Rights Watch and Oxfam.
Bottom line is we need a people’s vaccine, not a profit vaccine and far less vaccine nationalism. Canada has promised to donate the equivalent of at least 200 million doses to the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility by the end of 2022. Canadians have to be watchful to see how this plan rolls out because, as the World Health Organization director noted, “There has been a lot of talk about vaccine equity, but too little action.”
So join Jill Davies and make it your New Year’s resolution to write to a few politicians.
Former Advertiser and Journal reporter Wendy Elliott lives in Wolfville.