[News] We Suffer from an Incurable Disease Called Hope - It is disheartening to see ‘vaccine nationalism’

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/48-covid-vaccines/ We
Suffer from an Incurable Disease Called Hope: The Forty-Eighth Newsletter
(2020).
November 26, 2020 - Vijay Prashad
------------------------------

[image: Public Health Elimination Team for the Elimination of ‘Four Pests’,
China, 1958.]

Public Health Elimination Team for the Elimination of ‘Four Pests’, China,
1958.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social
Research.

The total level of global indebtedness now sits
<https://www.iif.com/Research/Capital-Flows-and-Debt/Global-Debt-Monitor>
at an astronomical $277 trillion, an increase of $15 trillion since 2019.
This amount is equivalent to 365% of the global gross domestic product. The
debt burden is highest in the poorest countries, where coronavirus defaults
have begun; Zambia’s default
<https://www.themastonline.com/2020/11/18/sovereign-debt-costly-cannot-be-renegotiated-anyhow-musumali/>
is the most recent. The various programmes to suspend debt servicing
payments – such as the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative
<https://g20.org/en/media/Documents/G20SS_PR_G20%20Paris%20Forum%20High-level%20Ministerial%20Conference_EN.pdf>
– and the various programmes of aid – such as through the International
Monetary Fund’s COVID-19 Financial Assistance and Debt Relief initiative
<https://www.imf.org/en/Topics/imf-and-covid19/COVID-Lending-Tracker> – are
certain to fall short. The G20 package has only covered 1.66% of debt
payments, since it has failed
<https://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/eurodad/pages/768/attachments/original/1603714501/DSSIShadowReport_14Oct_%281%29.pdf?1603714501>
to corral many private and multilateral lenders into its agreements.

The debt burdens are catastrophic for countries that simply do not have the
capacity to pay off their obligations, particularly during the coronavirus
recession. Last month, UNCTAD’s Stephanie Blankenburg told
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/43-2020-debt/>
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research that ‘debt write-offs in the
most vulnerable developing countries will be inevitable, and everybody
recognises this, but the question is on what terms this will happen’.

The IMF urges countries to borrow since interest rates are generally low.
But this provokes another important question: what should governments do
with the money that they would borrow? What the differential impact of the
pandemic has shown us is that countries
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-3-coronashock-and-socialism/>
with a robust public health system – including significant numbers of
well-equipped public health workers – have been able to better break the
chain of the infection than countries that have cannibalised their public
health systems. Since this is a largely recognised fact across the
political spectrum, it behoves countries to spend more of the new money on
rebuilding their public health systems. But this is not what is happening.

[image: Egon Schiele (Austria), The Family, 1918.]

Egon Schiele (Austria), *The Family*, 1918.

It is welcome news that there are now vaccine candidates from a range of
firms and countries, including the two m-RNA vaccines from Pfizer and
Moderna, as well as Gamaleya’s Sputnik V and Sinovac’s CoronaVac. Reports
from these and other vaccine candidates show positive results, which raises
hope that we will soon have some kind of vaccine against COVID-19.
Scientists are wary of the claims made by the private pharmaceutical
companies, which have released press statements but have not made the
findings of their clinical trials public. Some of these questions
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/14/good-news-on-vaccines-but-what-about-its-delivery/>
include whether the vaccines prevent infection, whether they prevent
mortality, whether they prevent transmission, and, finally, what would be
the duration of protection.

It is disheartening to see ‘vaccine nationalism’ eclipse the hope around
the development of the vaccine. The rich countries, with 13% of the world’s
population, have already secured 3.4 billion doses of the potential
vaccines; the rest of the world has pre-committed vaccine orders of 2.4
billion doses. The poorest countries, with a population of 700 million
people, have no agreements for the vaccine. They depend on the Covax
<https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/covax-explained> vaccine, developed in
partnership between the World Health Organisation, the Vaccine Alliance
<https://www.gavi.org/> (GAVI), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations <https://cepi.net/>(CEPI). Covax has agreements to secure about
500 million doses, which would be enough to vaccinate 250 million people
and cover about 20% of the populations of the poorest countries. In
contrast, the United States of America, by itself, has made agreements
<https://dukeghic.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2020/11/COVID19-Vax-Press-Release__28Oct2020-1.pdf>
to purchase enough doses to cover 230% of its population and could
eventually control 1.8 billion doses (about a quarter of the world’s
near-term supply).

India and South Africa have made a reasonable proposal
<https://docs.wto.org/dol2fe/Pages/SS/directdoc.aspx?filename=q:/IP/C/W669.pdf&Open=True>
to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) for the waiver of intellectual
property rights in relation to the prevention, containment, and treatment
of COVID-19; this would mean a suspension of the Agreement on Trade-Related
Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS
<https://www.wto.org/english/docs_e/legal_e/27-trips_01_e.htm>). Most of
the poorer nations are arguing for equitable and affordable access to
medicines and medical products during the pandemic, which the WHO has
backed in the WTO’s TRIPS council. This proposal has been opposed
<https://www.keionline.org/34235> by the United States, the United Kingdom,
Japan, and Brazil. They make the illusionary argument that a suspension of
intellectual property rights during the pandemic will stifle innovation. In
reality, a few major vaccine producers (Pfizer, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, and
Sanofi) monopolise the development of vaccines, which are often produced
using public subsidies (Moderna, for instance, received
<https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/rich-countries-call-dibs-covid-19-vaccines-image/>
$2.48 billion in public funds towards the vaccine). Innovation in areas
such as pharmaceuticals is often publicly funded but privately owned.

[image: Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (Japan), Smallpox Demons, New Forms of
Thirty-six Ghosts, 1890.]

Yoshitoshi Tsukioka (Japan), *Smallpox Demons, New Forms of Thirty-six
Ghosts*, 1890.

On 14 May, 140 world leaders signed a pledge
<https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/presscentre/featurestories/2020/may/20200514_covid19-vaccine-open-letter>
that demanded that all tests, treatments, and vaccines be patent-free and
that the vaccines be distributed fairly without cost to the poorer nations.
Several countries, including China, have joined this approach. The idea is
that the formula for one or more vaccines can be uploaded to a public site
where governments can direct their public sector pharmaceutical firms to
distribute the vaccines in their countries either for free or for an
affordable price or that private sector firms make vaccines and deliver
them at affordable prices. The need to diversify production comes because
there is simply not enough deep-freeze courier capacity to transport the
vaccines around the world. The issue of public sector pharmaceutical
capacity
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/14/good-news-on-vaccines-but-what-about-its-delivery/>
is a very pressing one, since over the past five decades the IMF has pushed
countries to privatise the public sector and rely upon a handful of
multinational drug companies. It is time, say the heads of governments who
signed the document, to reverse that trend and rebuild public sector
pharmaceutical production lines.

The way things are going, two-thirds
<https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/small-group-rich-nations-have-bought-more-half-future-supply-leading-covid-19>
of the world’s population will not have a vaccine before the end of 2022.

The struggle between ‘vaccine nationalism’ and the ‘people’s vaccine’
mirrors the fight between the North and the South over questions of debt
and over vast areas of human development. Precious resources need to go
towards testing, tracing, and isolation to break the chain of infection of
the virus; they need to go towards building up the public health
infrastructure, including training health care professionals who would need
to give the two-dose injection to billions of people; they need to be used
for the building of regional pharmaceutical production; and certainly they
need to go towards the immediate relief for people, including income support
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/dossier-28-coronavirus/>, food provision
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/20-2020-famine/>, and
social protection against the shadow pandemic
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-4-coronashock-and-patriarchy/>
of patriarchal violence.

Talking to doctors and scientists such as Yogesh Jain and Prabir
Purkayastha about the vaccine, I was reminded of a 2002 visit to Palestine
that Mahmoud Darwish had organised for writers, including Wole Soyinka,
José Saramago, and Breyten Breytenbach, when he greeted them with this
meditation on hope:

We have an incurable malady: hope. Hope in liberation and independence.
Hope in a normal life where we are neither heroes nor victims. Hope that
our children will go safely to their schools. Hope that a pregnant woman
will give birth to a living baby at the hospital, and not a dead child in
front of a military checkpoint; hope that our poets will see the beauty of
the colour red in roses rather than in blood; hope that this land will take
up its original name: the land of love and peace.

The International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People is on 29
November. We, at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, affirm our
affection and solidarity with the struggle of the Palestinians for
emancipation. We want to put on record a call for the release of all
Palestinian political prisoners, including Khitam Saafin
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2020/11/10/palestinian-womens-organization-leader-khitam-saafin-placed-in-administrative-detention-for-6-months/>,
the president of the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees, and Khalida
Jarrar
<https://peoplesdispatch.org/2019/10/31/israel-arrests-palestinian-lawmaker-khalida-jarrar-just-months-after-her-release/>,
a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The jails
where Israel imprisons Palestinians have seen
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/covid-israel-palestine-prisoners-infected>
devastating outbreaks of COVID-19.

[image: Kamal Nicola (Palestine), Sumud [Steadfastness], Palestine Red
Crescent Society, 1980.]

Kamal Nicola (Palestine), *Sumud *[Steadfastness], Palestine Red Crescent
Society, 1980.


Physicians for Human Rights Israel wrote a short note
<https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(20)30237-0/fulltext#%20>
in *The Lancet* called ‘Battling COVID-19 in the occupied Palestinian
territory’. They describe the efforts of the dedicated Palestinian health
care workers as being ‘hampered by the unique restrictions faced by the
Palestinian health system.’ This includes the separation between East
Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, the ‘restrictions that Israel imposes’,
and the imprisoned nature of the entire Palestinian population. The three
million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have access to
only 87 intensive care beds with ventilators (with much lower numbers for
the two million Palestinians in Gaza), while Israel enforces a water and
electricity crisis on the Palestinians.

The situation is deplorable. Struggle and hope are its antidotes.

Warmly,

Vijay.

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