Are Wealthy Countries Vaccine Gluttons?

The pandemic brings out the best and worst in governments, and I understand that each government has a responsibility to their own population.

Having lived in a developing country and now a developed country, I can see the differences first hand and I feel for those poorer countries that don’t have access to the latest medical technology.

Australia has a population of 25 million, yet the vaccine count that the government has secured is 280 million doses. So that is 11 vaccines per person.

The developing world has vaccination rates of about max 10% depending on the numbers you look at. Some countries in Africa have a vaccination rate of 2%.

Is it not incumbent on the more developed countries to assist the poorer countries? Is it not incumbent on the large pharmaceutical companies to assist the poorer nations? We can all see the amazing profits being raked in by the likes of Pfizer.

Is this about healthcare or shareholder value? Now that wealthier countries have worked out their responses and processes, should the focus not be on the countries without the infrastructures and processes?

The wealthier countries should donate vaccines to the most vulnerable in poorer countries, rather than hanging onto 11 doses per person like here in Australia. Hoarding vaccines is a picture of the greed and selfishness that permeates the world, with little regard for those less fortunate.

Imagine the goodwill that the likes of Pfizer could generate by assisting the poorer countries with providing vaccines at cost or donating vaccines?

Medical apartheid is happening worldwide and nobody seems to care, are we really a generation that is so wrapped up in “I” as in iPhone, iPad, iTunes, etc that we don’t care about us, about we, about the global village that is the world in which we live?

I hate the fact that I can get so many vaccines when others around the world can’t even get one, that the most vulnerable in the most vulnerable societies fight the ravages of the virus daily.

Here I am, a healthy person, while someone who is elderly in Africa somewhere, with a compromised immune system, doesn’t have access to the best medical care.

We can sleep well at night knowing we are safe. “We’re ok so we needn’t concern myself with anyone else.” This is such a selfish and sad place to be.

I think of all the people who don’t have what we have here, and then I think of all the profits of large corporations, benefitting from wealthy governments, but not using those benefits to assist the poorer governments.

I suppose when the products that are manufactured with cheap labour by those poorer countries don’t reach us, and affect our lives, maybe then we will wake up?

Maybe the big corporations that employ the cheap labour at a cheap price to increase their profits will wake up when the virus ravages their labour force?

I think it’s only when reality bites and affects us directly that we realise that perhaps we should have cared more for the rest of the world more than just our own first world bubble.

Humanity has killed off humanity throughout history. Are we still guilty of this through our economics, technology, and greed? It seems we still have not learnt to love our neighbours

Ok rant over, just wanted to get that off my chest. “Why can’t we all just get along?” asked Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks. The original was Rodney King after the Los Angeles riots in May 1992 “Can’t we all just get along.”

It seems these questions are still as relevant today as they always were.