When the history of this pandemic is written, it will be difficult to decide whether the immorality of the rich countries or their stupidity outweighed. 17 months after WHO declared a global emergency by SARS-Cov2 virus, reliable estimates (The Economist) suggest a true death toll that is triple the 5.2 million reported in official statistics. Many of these dead, possibly the majority, have been buried in poor countries. The coronavirus has devastated societies, economies and protection systems, returning poverty levels to the situation of two decades ago and generating a debt crisis that will leave the eighties with a financial cold.
If the lives of those who suffer from poverty are worth nothing, how much are ours worth? From an epidemiological point of view, the strategy of the most developed economies has been a shot in the foot. Each of the warnings from the scientific community About the mutations of this type of virus and the impossibility of dealing with it in silos, they have collided with the electoral fear of our leaders and the disinterest of our societies. Like opulent and capricious children, the rich world monopolizes diagnoses, treatments and vaccines while its citizens dance in the discotheques and demonstrate in the streets demanding the freedom to live infected.
The photograph of global immunization is obscene. At the time of this writing, the rate of the population that has received at least one dose of some vaccine against covid-19 is 69% in the United States, 70% in the EU and 11% in Africa (Our World in Data). The mechanism Covax —For the immunization of low-income countries— it has only managed to finance 433 of the 2,000 million doses that should cover the complete vaccination of 20% of the world’s population. Only 4% of the more than 7,000 million doses produced so far have reached the arms of the poorest population.
From an epidemiological point of view, the strategy of the most developed economies has been quite a shot in the foot
Even in the midst of the greatest fiscal expansion since World War II, developed countries have not been able to find the crumbs that would finance the global vaccination effort. Worse still, their governments have actively blocked exceptions to intellectual property and knowledge transfer that would have allowed dose production to scale up in middle-income countries like India, Brazil or South Africa.
Now we are faced with a new variant that threatens to undermine part of the extraordinary effort made up to now. And who can say that he is surprised? “Our failure to put vaccines in the arms of the people of the developing world is now turning against us,” Gordon Brown said Friday in a bitter comment for The Guardian. Variant B.1.1.529 appears to be more contagious than the previous ones and we still don’t know if our pharmaceutical toolbox is effective against it.
Scientific certainties will still take some time, but that hasn’t stopped Europe from hitting the gas in the middle of the curve. It turns to cut off the relationship with South Africa —Who has informed quickly and impeccably about the new variant— and to blame the victim for his situation. Perhaps someone should wonder why the average immunization (a single dose) in the seven plagued countries is below 25%. We seem cynical, but I think we are just stupid.
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