Richer countries must stop hoarding vaccines
Richer countries that hoard vaccines display an ignominious “me-first” attitude and ignore the fact that no country can be an island, says Lord Peter Hain
“Nobody is safe until everybody is safe” is a widely repeated phrase when it comes to managing the Covid-19 pandemic, yet until now the behaviour of most nation states has been the exact opposite. Britain astutely grabbed multiple pharmaceutical contracts nearly a year ago, so that aged 71, I have had my Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine when my cousins of a similar age in South Africa haven’t. Despite the UK having one of the worst infection and death rates in the world, prime minister Boris Johnson has transformed his reputation for Covid incompetence into praise for his vaccination programme. Yet Britain is an island economy dependent upon international trade. So Brits can all be vaccinated to kingdom come, but we cannot isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Even during lockdown, people steering planes, ships and lorries have poured in. Under globalisation’s financial and technological integration, no country and nobody can be an island. But it’s hardly surprising that the world has splintered, competed and disputed over vaccine supplies, because that’s how the world has been run over recent years. Nationalism has vanquished internationalism; unilateralism has overwhelmed multilateralism. President Trump epitomised this by abandoning the Paris Climate Change Treaty and sidelining the UN, NATO and the EU. He even announced, in the middle of a pandemic, that the US would be leaving the World Health Organisation. His “America First” policy was paralleled by “Russia First”, “China First” and “India First”. Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi – as well as Bolsonaro, Erdogan and of course Brexit – all reflected a me-first world just at a time when climate change and then the pandemic needed the very opposite. South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa – also chair of the African Union – pleaded at the Digital Davos in January for “rich countries” to release “their hoards” of Covid-19 vaccines – and he denounced “vaccine nationalism”. In South Africa around 50,000 have died from Covid-19 and 1.5m have been infected, though numbers are probably higher than these official estimates.