adminJOHANNESBURG. — Even before the world has found a Covid-19 vaccine, rich countries have staked their claim to the first doses. Here is what history can teach us about the quest for a fair shot at what remains.
It is an unseasonably cold October day in Johannesburg, and Robyn Porteous is following a handful of others up the stairs of a clinic at the Reproductive Health and HIV Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits).
“I think they have you do this just to prove you don’t have Covid,” quips the 32-year-old digital marketer, as she passes another landing. Three more flights of stairs to go, not that the marathon runner is showing any signs of strain.
The group eventually arrives at a small waiting room. Black plastic chairs are arranged in a neat socially-distanced square. Despite the weather outside, the windows are open and through them the tops of brownstone office buildings and pink and white apartment blocks shrouded in the morning fog are visible.
“Ventilation,” Porteous explains. The drafts travelling through the windows reduce the risk of transmission for airborne infections such as the novel coronavirus.
South Africa has just come through the country’s first wave of Covid-19. A television in the waiting room plays a local news report featuring the country’s health minister, Zweli Mkhize, speaking about the latest cases. A caption below his image reads: “Mkhize warns against complacency.”
Back in June, Porteous had a heated Twitter debate in defence of Covid-19 vaccine trials in South Africa. It eventually brought her to this very room two months later — where she took her first injection as a volunteer in the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trial, one of four currently ongoing in the country.
“It was as much like a rise to a challenge as it was just wanting to kind of do something,” she says of her decision to join the study. “You feel really helpless in a pandemic. I can’t donate endless amounts of money but can hopefully donate my body to some kind of scientific research that matters.”
Porteous will now be one of about 2 000 people in the study, which follows an earlier UK trial study that found the vaccine was safe and showed promise in helping the body mount a possible defence to Covid-19.
Vaccine nationalism: Many rich countries claim the “lion’s share”
More than four dozen potential Covid-19 vaccines are in human clinical trials, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Four are being tested in South Africa. But before any of these jabs have been proven to work, there is another looming roadblock: Some parties, including the United States, European Union and the United Kingdom, are staking their claim to what Oxfam senior policy adviser Mohga Kamal-Yanni calls the “lion’s share” of doses.
A recent analysis by Duke University found that countries have already confirmed purchases for 3.8 billion doses and a further 5 billion doses were under negotiation or had been reserved as of late October. Of course, not all experimental immunisations will successfully make it through clinical trials. The US, followed by the EU and India, have so far secured the largest number of potential doses, according to the report.
In September, US Republican Senator Thom Tillis introduced the America First Vaccine Act. If signed into law, the act would prohibit the export of any Covid-19 vaccine developed using government funding until firms had met US demand for it.
“Once that vaccine is developed, Americans should get the vaccine first, before it goes to other countries . . . ensuring that they receive a return on their investment,” Tillis said in a statement.
The US government has invested at least $11bn in Covid-19 vaccine development, according to US consumer advocacy organisation Public Citizen. The brand of vaccine nationalism behind Tillis’ proposed legislation is not new. During the 2009 H1N1 flu outbreak, high-income countries able to produce vaccines refused to export them until their domestic needs were met, researchers wrote in 2019 in the healthcare journal The Milbank Quarterly. — Aljazeera.
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