Western Morning News (Saturday)
Vaccine nationalism serves nobody well
WHETHER or not you wanted Brexit, you have to be intrigued by the controversy surrounding the scramble for Covid-19 vaccines in European countries this week.
Released from EU constraints, the UK was first to approve and sign a contract for supplies of the Oxford AstraZeneca jab which is now being administered with some haste in the Westcountry.
Meanwhile other EU countries, who must work in agreement, only officially approved the vaccine yesterday and have been badly hit by problems at European plants.
Time was when the UK would have been expected to share its supply. But released from our neighbourly duties – and keen to stem our own horrendous death toll and maintain a vaccination schedule envied across the world – the PM’s answer is more than definitely going to be nein, non or nada.
Meanwhile the other European leaders no longer appear to be working in any kind of union as they each stake a higher claim to the coveted supplies.
Of course the UK can not take an isolationist stance on Covid-19. The pandemic has to be tackled at a global level if coronavirus is to be defeated. And that means the poorest and smallest countries must have access to affordable vaccinations.
As vaccines minister Nadhim Zahawi said this week: “No-one is safe until the whole world is safe.”
But with export tariffs combining with the economic woes of the UK lockdown, the situation at present does seems to be every man for himself.
And despite the pleas from Stella Kyriakides, the European health commissioner, that millions of doses made in the UK should now go to the EU, AstraZeneca has been sticking with the mantra of “first come, first served.”
The lack of doses in the EU has forced the Spanish government to announce a temporary pause in its rollout of the vaccine in Madrid and to warn that Catalonia could follow. Hospitals in Paris and surrounding regions have been told their vaccination programme is to be suspended.
Meanwhile here in the UK there are reports of surplus Covid-19 vaccines being given to healthy young people as some GPs have “run out” of eligible patients to vaccinate.
Other vaccination centres have also taken a liberal approach, inviting younger patients for jabs at the end of the day if they have surplus doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which has a shelf life of just three days.
In the meantime, many elderly people in UK care homes are still dying from Covid as GPs grapple with the logistics of sending vaccinators into residences where there could be active cases.
Sadly, many more elderly people will also miss out on their vaccines because they are too frail, confused or tired to book an appointment.
My 84-year-old mother finally received her first dose this week after I’d all but given up on her being called.
I’d started to get prickly when I heard about younger people having both first and second doses. My mother got even more prickly as I constantly asked whether she was sure she hadn’t received a phone call or letter.
Sent second class, mum’s letter took several days to be delivered when it arrived on Monday. I snatched it away from her and quickly booked an appointment at Plymouth’s big vaccination centre at Home Park.
Despite arriving on a cold and miserable morning – and needing to push a wheelchair around a potholed car park– the process was reassuringly friendly, efficient and slick.
But for me there remains ethical questions about whether I should snap up the first available appointment for a vaccine, when my own time comes in the over-50, but not vulnerable, category.
Of course the UK needs to vaccinate as many people as possible for it to be effective and I don’t want to risk catching and passing on Covid. I’m certainly not an anti-vaxer and I don’t want allocated supplies to go to waste. On a purely selfish basis, a vaccination card could also be my passport to a summer holiday in France or Spain later this year.
But as someone who remains fiercely European, should I not stand behind my European friends in the queue for vaccination?
And that moral dilemma doesn’t even touch the issue of getting the vaccine to the Third World.
Earlier this week Sir Jeremy Farrar, the scientific adviser to the UK government, urged against vaccine nationalism, saying “it doesn’t serve anybody to have these fights over vaccine supply”.
But the squabbles certainly were continuing yesterday with the EU even considering legislation to stop vaccines – such as the UK’s supply of the Pfizer jab made in Belgium – leaving their borders.
Poet John Donne famously wrote that no man is an island – and his words have often been quoted during Brexit debates.
Maybe now, in the midst of a deadly pandemic, we need to read to the end of the poem and think about the line: “any man’s death diminishes me... never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
As someone who remains fiercely European, should I not stand behind my European friends in the queue for vaccination?