When wealth is health

“There will be more vaccines rolling out of these giant pharmaceutical companies’ facilities in the years to come.

“One in four” versus “one in 500.”

That is the shocking truth about vaccine distribution in the world, as revealed by the World Health Organization (WHO) recently.

In our Covid-tinged reality, the rich get richer and the poor get sicker.

In reports recently, WHO said rich countries have received “more than 87 percent and low-income countries just 0.2 percent of the vaccines.”

Translated, it means one in every four persons has been vaccinated in wealthy nations, while only one in every 500 in poorer nations has gotten that jab.

Just to drive home the point, here’s what WHO chief Tedros Ghebreyesus said: “On average in high-income countries, almost one in four people has received a vaccine. In low-income countries, it’s one in more than 500. Let me repeat that: one in four versus one in 500.”

Well, of course. Sometime during this pandemic, when vaccine development was being followed religiously around the world, cynics may have thought about the money to be made by pharmaceutical companies that were rich enough to invest in vaccine research, production and marketing.

It was natural to assume that countries that could pay for these products would get the vaccines first. And that is exactly what happened. The Bloomberg Vaccine Tracker analyzed, in a report last week, that “40 percent of the Covid-19 vaccines administered globally have gone to people in 27 wealthy nations that represent 11 percent of the global population. Countries making up the least-wealthy 11 percent have gotten just 1.6 percent of Covid-19 vaccines administered so far.”

Moreover, Bloomberg said, “countries with the highest incomes are vaccinating 25 times faster than those with the lowest.”

It’s a very “lopsided” distribution, indeed, and one that ultimately affects everyone in the world.

There will be more vaccines rolling out of these giant pharmaceutical companies’ facilities in the years to come. After all, the whopping number of 726 million doses already administered in 174 countries represents only a fraction of total world population.

Vaccine makers Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca stand to make billions of dollars in sales right now.

Meanwhile, people around the world are still getting infected — the transmission faster and the death toll higher. What does it profit these wealthy nations if all the world is not similarly protected?

In fact, the whole vaccine diplomacy issue has gotten some critics’ hackles up. They call it hoarding, and some of them are blaming Europe and the US for helping “spread” the virus by “dragging their feet in setting protocols in place, delaying mandatory mask-wearing and giving mostly miserly handouts to the millions struggling to survive in lockdown,” as Fatima Bhutto writes in an opinion piece in The Guardian.

Bhutto alleges that rich countries have “secured 53 percent of the best vaccines,” while “nine out of 10 people in poor countries may never be vaccinated at all.”

This is perhaps part of the reason countries in Africa are making their own solutions. There is the much-maligned Ivermectin, which has been helping people stay protected against infection, as well as helping Covid-positive patients get well, no matter what other people say.

Allegations have run rife about big pharma acting purely out of its own interests to make sure the cheaper, most effective treatment remains either out of reach or an object of doubts and fears by people who need them most.

Hereabouts, some very irate citizens are questioning another name in pharma about its role in what is called “Covid-drug wars,” in which Ivermectin is once more in the limelight. Merck, which made Ivermectin years ago, recently issued a statement that said there is “no scientific basis for a potential therapeutic effect against Covid-19 from pre-clinical studies.” Critics point out that it is because the company is currently developing an antivirus drug of its own, and the presence of Ivermectin could significantly reduce its profits in the future.

More than Covid-19, some things in this life are simply sickening.

“There is the much-maligned Ivermectin, which has been helping people stay protected against infection, as well as helping Covid-positive patients get well.