Race

Sure, we are in a race. The DOH tells us we are in a race.

But we are not racing against any other nation. We are racing against an unknowable number of variants the coronavirus may mutate into the longer it is able to circulate. Some of the identified variants show signs not only of being more transmissible but also of being deadlier.

This is a test of the fittest, the driver of evolution. The virus mutates to survive the countermeasures taken against them. If vaccines produce antibodies that hamper the ability of the virus to reproduce, it will soon evolve into new variants that will defy the antibodies.

Viruses are not intelligent forms of life. The simply behave according to the logic of all of nature.

Unlike homo sapiens, however, the viruses do not create conditions for their own annihilation. Only humans, the most intelligent of all species, are capable to doing that. This has to be the final irony of evolution.

We do not have a running tally of vaccinations done. They should be running at several thousands. From my own count, we have about a million doses of vaccines safely delivered.

Despite all the dry-runs conducted, the inoculation program seems to be proceeding at a very slow pace. At the present rate, it will take us a decade to get this done.

We could not properly scale up the pace of inoculations because we do not have enough supplies of the vaccines. Supply is the unbreakable ceiling over the vaccination program.

Money is not the issue. We have accessed enough emergency financing to cover procurement costs. But the rich countries are cornering supply and will continue to do so until they have vaccinated their entire populations.

Even if the rich nations vaccinate their own populations, however, they will not be safe. An infection anywhere, is an infection everywhere.

Herd immunity cannot apply to nations individually. That can only be an achievement of all of humanity.

This is the riddle befalling the global vaccination effort. Governments are under pressure from their constituents to achieve full vaccination at home and ahead of everyone else.  If they fail to do that, they will lose legitimacy.

This is why the democracies are also the worst hoarders of vaccines. Russia and China, even as they produce their own supply, have among the lowest rates of vaccination in the world. They are also the biggest donors of vaccines to the rest of the world. Much of the vaccines being administered in Asia, Africa and Latin America come from Russia and China.

India, with its vast pharmaceutical manufacturing base, will soon enter the game. It is estimated that India could produce 1.5 billion doses this year. India, China and Russia will eventually supply the bulk of the world’s vaccine needs.

Our error, it appears, is that we invested too much hope on acquiring Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca vaccines – mainly because these are the brands our people preferred. But these are also the brands the West grabbed and cornered immediately – because they can.

Our own FDA, obeying the whim of public preference, first granted EUA to Pfizer. But not a drop of this brand has landed on our shores. We should have ignored public preference and grabbed what was available in the global market. Pfizer and Moderna are notoriously challenging to transport and store because of their ultra cold requirements.

We now have a technical team checking out the Serum Institute in India and the Gamaleya in Russia to order what we can. We should have done this in the first place had our senators not ignorantly bullied our health officials about buying “inferior” vaccines. The only “inferior” vaccines are those we do not have.

Our politicians needlessly inserted themselves into the vaccine procurement process while some of our local executives conducted silly surveys among their uninitiated constituents about what vaccines they prefer. This is rule by the amateurs: the reason why democracies fail during period of crises.

When President Duterte said we should get Chinese vaccines (for reasons of availability), his critics were all over the place making unfounded accusations of kickbacks against the administration. This not only waylaid our procurement process, it boosted vaccine hesitancy among our people.

There should be a place in hell for those who intruded into the vaccine acquisition process to advance their petty political agendas. But in the meantime, while they are not yet in hell, we have to realign our procurement activities to better deal with the realities in the global marketplace.

Vietnam, with its reputation for stubborn self-reliance, is not in any particular rush to acquire Western vaccines. It is ramping up its own pharmaceutical industry to produce the vaccines the country needs.

Indonesia, early on, chose to import Chinese vaccines and its vaccination program seems to be running happily with the supply the country has. AstraZeneca will eventually be producing its vaccines in India – although some questions are now being raised about this particular vaccine’s ability to deal effectively with the new viral strains.

In the future, we should consider the wisdom of building up a decent vaccine production capacity. During the interwar years, the Philippines produced a variety of vaccines and supplied some of these to our neighbors, including China. Somewhere along the way, we lost that capacity.

We do not know how long the available vaccines will be efficacious in preventing severe infection. We could be inoculating repeatedly in the coming years. This could be a bottomless expense.