COVID-19: The World Needs a Vaccine Against Inequity Too

In this article: 
COVID-19: The World Needs a Vaccine Against Inequity Too
Fecha de publicación: 
22 January 2021
0
Imagen: 

While inequity becomes ever greater and more painful on the issue of anticovid vaccines and powerful nations; paradoxically, countries that are not among the richest are the most supportive.

For example, Venezuela and Cuba are advancing in the creation of the Vaccine Bank for the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America’s Trade Treaty, according to President Nicolás Maduro, who stressed the need to meet the drug needs in the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean, in the face of inequality in access to these supplies worldwide.

The 18th ALBA-TCP Summit, last December was the stage for this project, conceived to alleviate the monopoly of a few governments in the acquisition of most doses of vaccines for their respective countries.

These differences defending life, because that’s what the anticovid vaccine offers, this has been ratified recently by the general director of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with a stone-written sentence: " the world is on the brink of catastrophic moral failure and the price of this failure will be paid with the lives and livelihoods of the poorest countries. "

The general director of WHO sentenced regarding how the use of the first vaccines is regarded: "As the first vaccines begin to be used, the promise of equitable access is at serious risk," he said.

He supported his statement with figures that are like punches to the face: More than 39 million doses of vaccines have been administered in some 49 higher-income countries, while only 25 doses have reached a single low-income country.

Even within the most developed nations themselves, these variations are still evident and the United States is an example of such regrettable contrasts.

In that northern nation, where democracy has been shattered unprecedentedly in the past month, Afro-descendant citizens are vaccinated against Covid-19 at dramatically lower rates in comparison to white North Americans.

That reality is the same as the number of deaths from the pandemic: African Americans and Hispanics are dying almost three times more than white North Americans, according to an analysis by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The inequalities regarding vaccines are so evident that the Puebla Group issued a statement last Monday addressed to all governments and calling for greater efforts so that all the inhabitants of the planet receive the necessary doses of the vaccine without economic, political, ethnic or cultural distinction.

"As an international community, we must work for unrestricted respect for human rights, and be available to face together the new challenges presented by the complex moment we are living in the face of the worsening of infections at a global level," said the statement.

Having sound reason, the Cuban Foreign Minister warned about how only a dozen countries have acquired 95% of the vaccines against Covid-19 which have been produced and in this regard he asked from the social network Twitter: “How to guarantee equitable access to immunization in the nations of the South? How to ensure vaccination of the poor and vulnerable families? How long will this take?

Right now, it’s difficult to answer those questions. What is already safe and easy to deduce is that the world is also lacking a vaccine whose antibodies avoid discriminating black bodies, poor bodies; all in all a vaccine against inequity.

Translated by: Amilkal Labañino Cubasí Translation Staff

Add new comment

CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether or not you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.