[News] Why Africa Gets Fewer Jabs: Roots of Vaccine Apartheid

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  Why Africa Gets Fewer Jabs: Roots of Vaccine Apartheid

April 4, 2021
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Since then, "Africa accounts for the lowest number of doses that has 
been administered per 100 people (only 0.7 doses), compared to 5.0 doses 
for Asia, 8.0 doses for South America, 16 doses for Europe, and 27 for 
North America. At the current rate, the continent is expected to only 
reach herd immunity in 2023 at the earliest", according to Uwagbale 
Edward-Ekpu, a Nigerian journalist specialized in Science and Technology.

At least five African countries could be able to develop and produce 
their own vaccines in order to avoid this "Vaccine Apartheid," but they 
have chosen no to do so, reports Edward-Ekpu in Quartz, relying instead 
on imported technology.

The fundamental reason for all this, says Stern, lies on IMF and World 
Bank-promoted structural adjustment programs implemented in Africa in 
the 1980's, which forced governments to adopt neoliberal economic 
policies, that in turn focused not only on restructuring services, 
finance and industry, but also on a cultural revolution of sorts.

Regarding Covid19, "the optimism that Africa would be spared by "early 
lockdown", "less dense population, "the effect of ultraviolet", "a 
climate that meant people spent more time outside" and "Africa's 
youthful population" has rapidly faded. Officially there are now more 
than 100,000 deaths on the continent, but the real numbers are much 
higher due to the paucity of testing and the lack of capacity to 
accurately track and evaluate causes of mortality".

"Following independence, higher education was a key part of the national 
development project and was aimed at training Africans to take on vital 
new roles as doctors, teachers, lawyers, civil servants, and 
economists", Stern says.

"Economic curriculum in universities theorized about the nature of 
Africa's integration into the global economy and the domestic policies 
needed to enhance development. Debates on the government strategies drew 
on diverse theoretical traditions such as institutional and structural 
economics. There was a general consensus on the need for African 
countries to use government tools to build an industrial base."

Shocking neoliberal policies triggered resistance from African academic 
quarters, but the very same policies meant that African universities and 
institutes began to be grossly underfunded. "The World Bank and other 
donors realized that opposition could be demobilized, and "ownership" 
generated by incorporating the economics profession into the Western 
economic model", Stern says."Neoliberalism loosened restrictions on 
capital flows, privatized state enterprises, and liberalized trade 
undermining local manufacturing capacity leading to more reliance on 
imports of manufacturing goods including pharmaceuticals and other 
health commodities. Increasingly African countries became more dependent 
on exporting unprocessed raw materials for foreign exchange. Hence, 
adjustment led to the deindustrialization of the continent and returned 
Africa to its colonial style extraction economy with its problematic 
boom and bust commodity cycles. Manufacturing fell from 18% of GDP in 
1980 to only 7%-9% after 2000".Following this path, Nigeria's 
Edward-Ekpu points out,  the Afrieximbanks is ready to lend African 
countries up to 2 billion dollars to purchase US and 
European-manufactured vaccines, while the cost of developing an 
independent jab would cost a fraction of that: between $8 million to 
$350 million, which nobody seems willing to fund.Edward-Ekpu underlines 
the sharp contrast between middle-income African countries policies such 
as Nigeria, Morocco, South Africa, Egypt, Senegal, with counterparts 
like India, Cuba, India, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Thailand, and 
Iran, all of which are developing vaccines and conducting clinical tests.

Not by accident, at the very outset of the Covid19 pandemic, Cuba 
launched a national crusade involving dozens of state pharma and biotech 
enterprises as well as research institutes, universities and hospitals, 
to develop its own vaccine, which was -also not by chance- named 
Soberana (Sovereign).

Five different vaccines are under development in the blockaded socialist 
island, two of them in the final stages of phase-three clinical trials. 
Cuba aims at producing 100 million doses, inoculate 100 percent of its 
population by midyear.
-- 
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