The pandemic affects the entire planet and the solution must necessarily be global. The vaccine must reach all corners of the globe, otherwise it will not be controlled.
The richest countries, notably the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and some others have agreed with the pharmaceutical companies that produce vaccines to buy billions of doses, many more of those they need to immunize their entire population. China and Russia rely on their own vaccines and have even started supplying them to third parties, such as Argentina or Brazil. The wealthy monarchies of the Arabian peninsula are paying much higher prices to secure their share of the pie, and the rest of the underdeveloped and third world states are entirely dependent on the World Health Organization for vaccines.
Hoarding vaccines to immunize our own citizens and ignoring the needs of the rest of the world is a suicidal strategy, since if the virus continues to circulate in large areas of the world, they become a reservoir of infection that will cause continuous returns of the same. Israel is not supplying vaccines to the Palestinians in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza, thus violating international law that obliges it, as an occupying power, to meet the needs of the population under its tutelage, but it is to have the virus circulating between Palestinians with whom you share territory can invalidate, at least partially, the group immunity that you get with vaccination, especially if you have important bags of vaccine refractory among yours, as is the case among the ultra-Orthodox. It appears that the Israeli government is timidly rectifying and has begun supplying vaccinations to Palestinian doctors and other medical and emergency personnel.
The EU gambles much of its badly deteriorated prestige as an economic and political power through the procurement and supply of vaccines. Having acted jointly, as a single entity, in the participation of the development of some vaccines and the contracting of the supply of the same and their subsequent distribution for all the countries of the union, has undoubtedly been the most important action taken as EU in many years and a demonstration of its power and capacity when it acts as a political organization on behalf of 450 million citizens. But the logistical problems that have arisen in the supply of vaccines by pharmaceutical companies and the suspicions, real or conspiracy, that have arisen in this regard, pose a major challenge whose satisfactory solution lies in the recovery or loss of prestige of the company. European Commission, as, for once, the authentic government of the EU.
But the EU is also playing the recovery of its also deteriorated moral prestige with the leadership of the cooperation with the WHO on universal access to vaccines. The huge amounts of money invested in subsidizing their development and the purchase of billions of doses should serve to pressure pharmaceutical companies to supply WHO with vaccines for vaccination programs in countries that do not have the vaccine. economic capacity to immunize its entire population.
That vaccination is universal is of the utmost interest to all to achieve control of the pandemic.
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