COVID-19 vaccine apartheid and the failure of global cooperation

Abstract

The equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines is one of the most important tests of global cooperation that the world has faced in recent decades. Collectively, global leaders failed that crucible abysmally, creating a ‘vaccine apartheid’ that divided the world according to income into countries with widespread access and those without. Why, given that leaders were fully aware of the risks and injustice of vaccine inequity, did governments of wealthy countries hoard doses, impede the expansion of vaccine manufacturing and otherwise prevent equitable access to vaccines? We argue that their decisions to act selfishly are best explained by governments’ accountability to domestic constituencies, their lack of leadership and commitment to multilateralism and their adoption of short-term perspectives, as well as their unwillingness to curb the influence of profit-oriented global pharmaceutical companies and, to a certain extent, of an additional private actor, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Contaminating National Identity Through Intercultural Intimacy: (Im)purity and the Pandemic

“…Canada purchased more vaccine doses per-capita than any other country, but it donated a mere fraction of its stockpile-less than 10%-to other countries (Brown & Rosier, 2023;Canada's International Vaccine Donations, 2022;Rastello & Bolongaro, 2020). Despite the existence of multilateral acquisition initiatives like COVAX, which aimed to pool global resources and distribute doses in an equitable manner internationally, wealthy nations, including Canada, used their wealth and power to circumvent these, hoarding doses against experts' warnings, prolonging the pandemic and providing more opportunities for the virus to mutate (Brown & Rosier, 2023).…”

“…Canada purchased more vaccine doses per-capita than any other country, but it donated a mere fraction of its stockpile-less than 10%-to other countries (Brown & Rosier, 2023;Canada's International Vaccine Donations, 2022;Rastello & Bolongaro, 2020). Despite the existence of multilateral acquisition initiatives like COVAX, which aimed to pool global resources and distribute doses in an equitable manner internationally, wealthy nations, including Canada, used their wealth and power to circumvent these, hoarding doses against experts' warnings, prolonging the pandemic and providing more opportunities for the virus to mutate (Brown & Rosier, 2023). These examples serve to illustrate what academics-public health specialists, policy analysts, and political economists-have argued: COVID-19 vaccine distribution was carried out in an unnecessarily reckless and unjust fashion that reflected and perpetuated international inequalities, and that exacerbated neocolonial relations of dependence, inequality, and subordination.…”