Catastrophic moral failure

Grotesque. A moral outrage. A catastrophic moral failure. Economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.

This month alone, those have been the harsh words used by the head of the World Health Organization to condemn the “shocking” inequality in the distribution of COVID vaccines worldwide.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has often warned that this vaccine imbalance could give wealthy countries a false sense of security. He stresses that if the virus continues to spread unchecked in some parts of the world, the entire planet would continue to face the risk of infection from variants and mutations that evade available vaccines.

As of April 1, when COVID had claimed 2.8 million lives worldwide, 86 percent of the 500 million vaccines administered had gone to wealthy economies and only 0.1 percent to the low-income ones.

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Despite the regular condemnation, I don’t see a lot of effort on the part of the rich countries to correct the vaccine inequality.

Instead what we see in the news are places where vaccination for herd immunity has been achieved or is within reach and many aspects of life are returning to pre-pandemic normal (although with some health protocols still observed).

Instead of sharing, the affluent countries are even ordering more vaccines to inoculate their populations twice, according to the WHO.

Even China (although officially still a developing country), with five of its own COVID vaccines approved for local emergency use, has slowed down its vaccine diplomacy to ramp up its domestic inoculation program.

Filipinos can’t forget that we could have gotten 10 million doses of Pfizer / BioNTech shots last January, facilitated last year by the US government, but this ball has been dropped. It would have meant five million lives saved and might have averted or at least minimized this ongoing killer COVID surge fueled by highly infectious variants. This, unfortunately, is now spilled milk.

Now Joe Biden’s administration seems principally focused on declaring US independence from COVID by the Fourth of July, America’s Independence Day. In the meantime, America has started vaccinating its younger people, from age 16, and may soon start on 12 to 15-year-olds, using the Pfizer-BioNTech shots.

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Elsewhere on the planet, the Indians are holding mass cremations of COVID victims in parking lots. The surge in India has slowed down global distribution of COVID jabs made in the world’s largest producer of vaccines.

In our country, the two weeks of enhanced community quarantine and a week of modified ECQ has not made a significant or sustainable dent in the unprecedented high number of infections and deaths.

By this time no one can dispute that this COVID surge is far more infectious and lethal than the one in mid-2020. And this time it looks like the virus and its variants want to kill as many elderly people and those with comorbidities as they can.

There are numerous stories this month alone of people catching COVID and being asymptomatic or feeling only mild symptoms, and then suddenly seeing their oxygen levels drop midway or near the end of the 14-day monitoring period. With the breathing difficulty, in two or three days their hearts or lungs give way and they are dead, even when attached to ventilators.

This is a deadlier pathogen. The surge calls for tweaking of all aspects of the responses, from testing to isolation and emergency treatment, particularly in the epicenter, the National Capital Region and the provinces of Bulacan, Cavite, Laguna and Rizal.

Until the NCR Plus heals, there will be only a handful of tourists traveling around the country, and economic activities nationwide will remain in the ICU.

The answer is vaccination – too late for those who died in the past two months alone – but the jabs can prevent more deaths.

The only question is, where are the vaccines?

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The World Trade Organization, backed by 80 developing countries, is suggesting the waiver of intellectual property rights on vaccines to ramp up global production.

Rich countries and pharmaceutical companies have pointed out that this is easier said than done. They argue that the infrastructure for safe production, storage and distribution as well as the necessary regulatory frameworks are not available in many countries. They also argue that the move could discourage research and development in the pharmaceutical industry.

The alternative presented by the opponents is vaccine sharing.

This is the idea behind the COVAX Facility, which aims to provide over two billion COVID doses to 190 countries by the end of this year. The project is led by the WHO, UNICEF, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

But COVAX is suffering from inadequate funding from the rich countries, supply shortages from manufacturers, and the rush of wealthy governments to complete their domestic COVID inoculation programs.

It is human nature to want to save your own first. As the WHO has lamented, however, it’s a moral outrage when the wealthy have started inoculating even their teenagers while thousands of high-risk people are dying of COVID daily elsewhere on the planet where vaccines are scarce.

April 7, World Health Day, had for its 2021 theme “building a fairer, healthier world.”

Global health care was unfair even before COVID. The pandemic has dramatically, tragically intensified the inequity.