Let’s vaccinate the whole world

We seldom have cause to comment on advertisements carried in this newspaper. After all, barring common sense restrictions on good taste and legal constraints on defamation, we do not tell our advertisers what to say. However, today, we run on one of our pages an advertisement for a global organisation, Vaccinate Our World (www.vaccinateourworld.org), which is lobbying for the widest possible use of vaccines to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Its ad issues a thought-provoking challenge: If the immorality of vaccine rationing doesn’t bother you, the grave danger that it poses to the world should.

On its website, the organisation quotes World Health Organisation figures, which show that 87% of the more than 700 million vaccines administered to date have gone to high-income countries. Low-income countries have got just 0.2%.

Some might say that’s just the way of the world – but having huge numbers of people unvaccinated is a threat to all humanity, because viruses mutate and vaccines can become ineffective. It is in everyone’s interests to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible … something which we can understand in South Africa with our snail’s pace vaccine roll-out.

Is it not time to relax medicine patents, then, to allow large-scale manufacture of these life-savers?