Dr. King and the 'great irony' of vaccine inequality

Wealthy countries are dumping unused, nearly-expired vaccine doses.

In Dr. Martin Luther King’s 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, he wrote,

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

While honoring Dr. King on this, his 93rd birthday, let’s keep in mind how the deadly global pandemic has only exacerbated existing systemic inequities that have plagued our country since its birth.

Case in point…

This from Brussels (AFP) — Poor countries have refused to take around 100 million donated Covid-19 vaccine doses in December alone, chiefly due to their short shelf life, the United Nations said Thursday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has slammed the deadly "moral shame" of high-income countries hogging vaccine supplies then offloading near-expired doses to jab-starved poorer nations.

It all began in early 2020 when some 30 rich nations—those able to pay high vaccine prices—cleared the world’s shelves of doses through advanced purchase orders, leading to vaccine apartheid. For example, Canada purchased enough doses to vaccinate its citizens five times over. The UK procured enough doses for four times its population. By the end of 2021, they were sitting on one billion unused doses. Like cigarettes and out-of-style clothing, these nearly-expired, unused doses have been sold or offered as politicized, Cold-War-driven, charity to hard-hit low-income countries, mainly people of color.

The biggest beneficiaries of this inequality have been the giant western pharmaceutical companies. Moderna, BioNTech, and Pfizer have cashed in thanks to public investments, monopolies, and low taxes while leaving millions, here in the US and globally, unprotected.

Thanks to their patent monopolies for successful vaccines against the coronavirus, won while their research was supported by $100 billion in public funding from taxpayers in the US, Germany, and other countries, the three corporations earned more than $26 billion in revenue in the first half of the year, at least two-thirds of it as pure profit in the case of Moderna and BioNTech.

The People’s Vaccine Alliance also estimates that the three corporations are over-charging, pricing vaccines by as much as $41 billion above the estimated cost of production.

Apart from the ethical argument that no country or citizen is more deserving than another, disease like COVID-19 will remain a threat globally, as long as it exists anywhere in the world.

Inequitable vaccine distribution is not only leaving millions or billions of people in all countries vulnerable to the deadly virus, but it is also allowing even more deadly variants to emerge and spread across the globe.

The US and other wealthy countries are far more likely to vaccinate their citizens, which risks prolonging the pandemic and widening global inequality. But here is the great irony in all this.

Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, director of the global health center at Columbia University, reports that wealthier nations have larger populations of older residents and cancer survivors who are more vulnerable to COVID. In contrast, she said poorer nations have larger populations of children and young adults who are less likely to die or become seriously ill from COVID.

"What's uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries. That's the irony of COVID-19."

The number of global pandemic deaths is rapidly approaching 6 million, with the US having the highest death toll by far. Aside from the reasons cited above by Dr. El-Sadr, US attempts to control the spread of COVID have run up against a right-wing movement encouraged by the former president, which discourages the use of vaccines and masking.

Unless vaccines and treatments are made readily available for the people of every nation, we will all continue to be plagued by the pandemic and its offshoots, a validation of Dr. King’s point that, indeed we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

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