Vaccine Apartheid: the next covid crisis

• Image Credit: Internet

• Dec 19, 2021 | Sourav Boruah

Digital Desk: No one is safe until everyone is safe, said Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO.

Imagine a world with ‘no covid restrictions’.

Imagine if the pandemic has ended, we don’t have to wear masks anymore which made us uncomfortable at many times, no boundaries can stop us anymore, the travelers are now a ‘bird with open wings.

The nightmares of horrific deaths due to covid 19 all across the world are now a ‘black chapter’ in our life. The world has revived from the bummer.

Humanity is certainly awaiting for such a day.

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Though in some parts of the world, to be precise the high-income countries are experiencing a surge in the highly contagious SARS-COVID Delta variant and recently Omicron, fortunately, the death counts are at a lower level as compared to previous deadly waves of this contagious virus.

The rapid action taken by the world vaccine producers is the key to saving millions of lives amid the pandemic.

The world now is facing another challenge that is ‘ Vaccine Apartheid’. Apartheid is an Afrikaans word meaning ‘separateness’ or ‘the state of being apart

As the demand for the life-saving vaccine is increasing, poorer countries will likely be left behind once again losing thousands of vaccine-preventable lives, further pushing back the global health and economic recovery and a chance to virulent variants of the virus to appear in the future.

As of 18 August 2021, 31.7% of the world population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and 23.7% is fully vaccinated. About 4.76 billion doses have been administered globally and 37.24 million are now administered each day. However, only 1.3% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose.

Vaccine apartheid will pose a newer threat to children's well-being who have already been harmed by the pandemic through its indirect consequences. Prolonged school closures not only led to reduction of social interactions and widened the educational disparities, but also led to food insecurities and safety concerns for children from fragile social backgrounds.

The Secretary-General of WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus once said that the world at present is facing a catastrophic moral failure in level access to a covid vaccine to combat the pandemic. The disastrous situation of India during March-May 2021 is a perfect example of what awaits us if we fail to change the course of the story and it is beyond moral discussions. It is an enormous mistake to believe that vaccine apartheid is a problem confined to low to middle earning countries. If inequalities persist and are neglected, the pandemic will not go away any time soon. It could cost trillions of dollars to world economies if access to COVID-19 vaccines endures.