Vaccine Apartheid: If One Person Is Unprotected, We Are All Unprotected

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Weekly Column Thursday, February 25, 2021


** Vaccine Apartheid: If One Person Is Unprotected, We Are All Unprotected
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By Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

“I’ve personally received more doses of a Covid-19 vaccine than 130 countries,” Dr. Craig Spencer writes, about the two vaccine shots he recently got as an emergency room doctor. In 2014, he contracted ebola while combating that epidemic in Guinea, Africa. Dr. Spencer knows the value of public health protocols, personal protective equipment, or PPE, and vaccinations.

“Just a few weeks ago, one of the only countries in sub-Saharan Africa to get vaccines was Guinea, and they received 25 doses — not 2,500, not 25,000, but 25,” Spencer, director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, said ([link removed]) on the Democracy Now! News hour. “I’ve been vaccinated, thankfully, but my friends who work in a clinic in southern Burundi in East Africa may have to wait until 2022 or 2023.”

The problem Dr. Spencer speaks of so personally has been described as vaccine apartheid, or vaccine nationalism. Wealthy nations, like the United States, the United Kingdom and European Union countries, contracted to buy billions of doses of prospective vaccines while they were still in development. Poorer nations, where 85% of the world’s population lives, are left scrambling, forced to wait for vaccine shipments from COVAX, the global cooperative vaccination facility coordinated by the World Health Organization.

Spencer notes that some rich countries have even bought up...Read More→ ([link removed])
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