From ‘Vaccine Apartheid’ to ‘Vaccine Diplomacy’: United States Aims to Help “Vaccinate the World”
America is moving from what has been called “vaccine apartheid” on the part of rich countries into an era of “vaccine diplomacy” as the country aims to “vaccinate the world.”
President Joe Biden on June 10 announced a major step in addressing vaccine apartheid, even as America struggled to meet Biden’s goal of 70% of the population having received at least a single dose of a COVID-19 vaccine by July 4th.
Biden announced the U.S. government is purchasing at a not-for-profit rate 500 million doses of PfizerBioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine to donate to the world to help poor- to middle-income countries, The first batch of 200 million doses will be used this year with another 300 million distributed in the first half of 2022.
The president said America was “the arsenal of democracy in World War II, and we’re going to be the arsenal of vaccines over the course of the next period to end this pandemic.”
COVAX, a World Health Organization-backed initiative, will make the shots available.
Vaccine apartheid happens when the population in the richer countries gets the first doses of COVID-19 vaccines and the population in low- to middle-income countries is left largely unvaccinated.
By early June, more than half the populations in the United States and the United Kingdom having had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, compared with fewer than 2 percent of people in Africa having been vaccinated.
Infectious disease expert Bruce Polsky, MD, Chairman, Department of Medicine, NYU Langone Hospital-Long Island, said, “Until the world achieves vaccination levels similar to what we’re getting in the U.S., this pandemic is just going to continue going on.”
Polsky is a member of Northwestern University’s CoVAXCEN coalition of academic, industry and government experts on vaccines.
Babafemi Taiwo, MBBS, Chief of Infectious Disease in the Department of Medicine at Northwestern Medicine Feinberg School of Medicine, said, “There is a striking disparity in access to vaccines around the world. Western countries, particularly the United States, are favored. To some extent, China is in a similar situation.”
Taiwo said widespread vaccination efforts internationally are vital because eventually nearly everyone on the planet will be exposed to the COVID-19.
”Five years from now, it is possible that there will only be a few people who haven’t had some kind of contact with the virus. I don’t think there is any option but to make this vaccine available to as many people as quickly as we can,” said Taiwo, a member of CoVAXCEN.
John Mattison, MD, an internal medicine specialist and co-chair of the CoVAXCEN Clinical Workgroup, said the COVID-19 vaccine doses will be lifesavers.
“Two hundred fifty million doses of Pfizer will protect 125 million people from getting Covid, and if it’s focused on the most vulnerable populations (elderly or immunocompromised have VERY high death rates), it could save MANY millions of lives.”
Mattison said the Biden plan is a humanitarian effort, but also has strategic national security aspects.
“The U.S. Department of Defense lists climate change as the #1 destabilizer of global peace, both because of various infectious diseases extending their range as climate changes (Zika, malaria, dengue, and chikungunya have all done this already) and climate refugees. Advanced tech countries like the United States desperately need, as a matter of natural defense, to help less affluent and less tech-advanced nations to address these infectious diseases, and mitigate the secondary impacts of climate refugees. These collateral benefits of vaccine diplomacy should not be underestimated for their impact on world health, peace and stability in an already destabilized global political environment,” he said.
“Supporting global COVID-19 vaccination reduces the ‘global breeding ground’ for new more contagious/lethal variants of the virus. While we should do this vaccine diplomacy as a humanitarian matter first and foremost, we also have a self interest by protecting ourselves from new variants, emerging in unvaccinated countries, and that can return to the US and escape the benefits of our initial round of vaccinations.
Northwestern COVID-19 Vaccine Communication and Evaluation Network (CoVAXCEN) seeks to achieve consensus on a variety of issues related to the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and then produce and disseminate written materials for scientists, healthcare professionals, and the general public describing its conclusions.
Headquartered in the Institute for Global Health's Center for Global Communicable and Emerging Infectious Diseases with the cooperation of the Center for Communication and Health, CoVAXCEN seeks to achieve consensus on a variety of issues related to the safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines and then produce and disseminate written materials for scientists, healthcare professionals, and the general public describing its conclusions.
Howard Wolinsky is a Chicago-based freelance medical writer and author. He is the former medical reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. He has won awards for medical writing from the American Public Health Association, the American Bar Association, and the Association of Health Care Journalists, the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award (“the Chicago Pulitzer''). The Sun-Times twice nominated him for the Pulitzer Prize.