After several days in hospital, Ila Bose (my grandmother) died in October. The exact trajectory leading to her death is not known — she had pneumonia towards the end — but my mother (also a physician) suspects she may have had lingering effects from a previous Covid case.
Our family was fortunate, despite how horrible it is to hear this. My grandmother was well off compared to most Indians. Although she had many adversities in her life, she was able to access medical care. She even received two doses of one of India’s vaccines.
The country’s large vaccine industry is being depended upon to meet the minimal goals of COVAX, the international public-private partnership that is meant to initially vaccinate up to 20 percent of the populations of Global South countries.
This initiative, which was doomed from the beginning, has failed poor countries. According to the African Union, only 11 percent of the populationOnly 16 percent of Africans have been fully vaccinated. Even so, these countries don’t have vaccines to spare: 64 percent of the vaccine supply has been used up.
Can you picture yourself looking at these numbers if you were looking at them if your loved ones lived somewhere in Africa? This is vaccine apartheid. It is the deep-seated inequalities of global vaccine distribution along national lines reflecting racial as well as economic divisions.
Bill Gates, an American billionaire who somehow turned a career as a Microsoft employee into a prominent figure in global public-health, created the COVAX Plan.
It Hurts the U.S. Too
The emergence the omicron variant shows how vaccine apartheid directly effects those of us who live in wealthy countries. It has created petri dishes that allow the coronavirus to further evolve and spread in all countries, poor and rich.
Or, to put it another fashion: an injury to one is a injury to all. We will not find a solution if we don’t come together to end this global problem.
Labor plays a vital role. Our status as workers gives power to us, but it also provides a foundation for solidarity across borders.
National Nurses United has made a good start — joining 27 sister unions worldwideto submit a petition against vaccine Apartheid to United Nations. This union pushed the Biden administration to support a relaxation in intellectual property rules at World Trade Organization, which would allow vaccines to be more widely available over time.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign, a non-profit labor-backed in the U.K. has been raising fundsto help the Cuban government blockaded to obtain raw materials, medicines, treatment and syringes. This doesn’t just benefit Cuba — the five vaccines developed there could offer the Global South an alternative source for vaccinesThese are not only the ones that have been developed by wealthy countries.
A shared future
Building union support for the fight against vaccine apartheid in richer countries can be part developing a wider sense of how global inequality affects us all.
We are all virus hosts to the virus. Our bosses see us as disposable for profits and can turn against each other. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for the accounting industry to increase offshoring and lay off workers in the U.S.
When the omicron wave began, the Biden administration immediately banned travelers from several southern African countries — while still allowing them from countries like the U.K. and Israel that also had omicron cases.
If we want to share the future of the planet, these kinds of divisive moves must be stopped. Instead, we can choose to live together.
