Page 12 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, MAY 2021, (English)

The Apartheid of Vaccines Perpetuates World Pandemic
A complex panorama lives the world regarding vaccines against covid-19.
The problem is that low and middle income countries lack the economic and technological capacity to import the best and less to produce them. Territories such as Latin America, Africa and some Asian areas must settle for products that, although they reduce morbidity, therefore mortality, do not diminish infections. That means going from outbreak to outbreak, something that while exist will prolong the pandemic beyond what is expected, a ecting the entire world. Thus, herd immunity becomes more distant every day.
Months before covid-19 vaccines began to be developed in the market, rich nations were able to secure signi cant amounts of doses, a privilege that the rest of the world did not have access to. The United States pre-ordered 800 million units, even before these products were nished, while the United Kingdom did the same with 340 million vaccines.
The industrialized nations not only agreed to large amounts of immunizations, but also negotiated with the main laboratories to obtain the most e icient products that would avoid the three main problems, infections, in other word, spred of the pathogen, morbidity and mortality.
So today, according to the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, the center for public policy and global health at Duke University, high-income countries have 4,6 billion con rmed doses of the best vaccines, while medium and low income nations count only with 670 million. In other words, currently in developed nations one in four people received their respective inoculation while, in the
poorest, one in 500.
It is observed that the doses are not being shared equitably, risking that the pandemic lasts inde nitely, something that the director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, described as “a catastrophic moral failure”.
And this despite the fact that the Member States of the WHO were divided into 98 rich and 92 poor nations, in order to subsidize and even o er these products to the most disadvantaged nations for free. This is how the Covax organization, for its acronym in English Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access, was founded under the motto: “We are not safe until everyone is safe.” It is an alliance of around 190 countries promoted by public and private actors with the aim of guaranteeing equitable access to vaccines.
But speci cally, while quality and quantity immunization advances by leaps and bounds in the West, with the United States covering 40 percent of its population; the UK at 30 per cent and Europe at nearly 14 per cent, according to the latest data collection from Our
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