Shane Te Pou
it spills over into next year.
Other wealthy countries are undeniably lapping New Zealand — Canada, for example, has procured more than 10 doses for every resident — but in a world of vaccine-haves and have-nots, we are decidedly in the former category.
Contrast this with Africa, where only around 1.5 per cent across the continent have received two doses, and where the pandemic is worse than ever due to outbreaks of the virulent Delta variant. Last week, the World Health Organisation reported that “Africa has recorded a 43 per cent week-on-week rise in Covid-19 deaths, as hospital admissions increase rapidly and countries face shortages in oxygen and intensive care beds”.
Meanwhile, even the most optimistic projections suggest fewer than 20 per cent of Africa’s population will be immunised by the year’s end and, according to the NY Times, Europe and South America are dispensing vaccines nearly 20 times faster than Africa. Make no mistake: this is the result of wealthy nations hogging supply. As of May 2021, 80 per cent of doses administered were in high-income and upper-middleincome countries, compared to just 0.4 per cent in low-income countries, and all but one billion of the 11 billion doses scheduled for production this year are already accounted for.
Even if African Governments somehow discover the resources to finance mass vaccinations, the supply simply isn’t there. It’s as if we learned nothing from the disastrous failure of the international community to prevent millions of Aids deaths by withholding life-saving HIV treatments from Africa for eight tragic years.
As Helen Clark told me this week, “the pandemic can’t be brought under control without high global rates of vaccination. We are a long way from achieving that.”
Beyond preventable death and disease, possibly on a catastrophic scale, a sprawling, out-of-control pandemic will inevitably set back the slow but consistent progress achieved across Africa since the 1990s against extreme poverty. As night follows day, expect famine, conflict and widespread social unrest in its wake — look at South Africa today.
For a tiny fraction of what wealthy nations like ours spent on Covid stimulus and recovery, we could immunise the globe without breaking a sweat.
Our failure to do so isn’t just a moral failure, it’s public health and geopolitical madness. Instead of stockpiling vaccines and rallying behind the precious intellectual property rights of a handful of pharmaceutical companies, a true global effort would have saved lives, defeated the pandemic once and for all, prevented economic mayhem, and engendered international goodwill for a generation.
It was a moment tailormade for enlightened self-interest, a case where doing the right thing is also doing the smart and strategic thing. History’s verdict is forming before our eyes, and it isn’t pretty,
Bring on the vaccines here in Aotearoa, for sure. Let’s hold the Government to its timetable, and get on with it. But, please, let’s not for a moment pretend we are victims of global vaccine inequality when we are plainly among its beneficiaries.
Me mahi tahi ta¯tou mo¯ te oranga o te katoa.
Let us work together to achieve ultimate wellbeing and health for all.