In the heat of the regrowth, the overabundance of vaccines in the United States sparks anger around the world

WASHINGTON – While the India announces the sad record of being the country with the most daily coronavirus infections in the world, Americans appreciate a spring loaded with vaccines.

Only 1.4% of India’s population is fully vaccinatedand overflowing hospitals lack oxygen. Meanwhile, in the United States – where one in four Americans has already received a full vaccination and more than 40% have already received at least one dose – one of Miami’s major hospitals, the Jackson Memorial, announced that This will slow down the vaccination rate, as demand decreases and they have surplus vaccines in stock.

In Michigan, health care workers dose high school students. In North Carolina earlier this month, dose boxes were sleeping in refrigerators.

The debate that has been brewing for some time around the glaring differences in access to the vaccine – especially between poor and rich countries, but also between certain developed countries – has reached its boiling point, and personalities are adding. and world leaders who they deplore the abundance of vaccines in some countries and the relative drought in almost all others.

There are African countries that report a “Apartheid vaccine”, while other countries are calling for changes in Washington’s foreign policy and broad reformulation of the patent and intellectual property laws that govern the manufacture of vaccines during a pandemic.

“It’s scandalous from an ethical, moral and scientific point of view”says Maria van Kerkhove, epidemiologist at the World Health Organization (WHO), of the global inequity in immunization.

“There is dry straw ready to burn everywhere”, from Van Kerkhove. “We are sitting on a powder keg”, he warns.

And this is happening at a pivotal moment in the pandemic. In some countries with high vaccination rates – United States, Great Britain, Israel – coronavirus cases are down or down. But overall, the number of new infections has practically doubled since February, according to WHO data, especially in some emerging countries, which have recorded their worst figures for the entire pandemic, such as the Argentina.

“In fact, there are many countries that don’t even have a vaccine,” says Rob Yates, executive director of the Center for Global Health at London think tank Chatham House. “There is a lot of anger, and it is justified.”

The contagion boom comes in the middle of another type of epidemic: the one on vaccine nationalism, which hinders the flow of doses to the poorest countries through the Covax, the WHO mechanism for the global distribution of vaccines.

Faced with the exponential increase in its cases, India – one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world, which mainly produces the AstraZeneca formula – stopped the export of doses already committed, dealing a hard blow to the Covax: 71% of their doses expected by the WHO initiative came from the Serum Institute of India, the country’s largest vaccine manufacturer. So far, however, the Covax has barely delivered 43 million of the 2 billion doses proposed for this year.

India hit a world record for new cases in a single day on Friday: more than 346,000, exceeding the previous mark also set by the same country the day before.

In India, they defend and blame the United States for policies that prevent the export of vaccines from that country, as well as the supplies used to make them. The Trump administration used the Defense Production Act of 1950 to speed up vaccine development. The government of Joe Biden has done the same, notably to increase the production of materials used in the manufacture of vaccines.

The White House stresses that the rule does not amount to an export ban. Critical voices, however, say that for all intents and purposes the same is true, as it allows US companies to squeeze to the top of the supply queue, relegating their global customers.

“Respected Mr. President of the United States, if we are truly together in the fight against the virus, the name of the vaccine industry outside the United States has humbly requested that lift the embargo on your country’s raw material exports so that global production can take offAdar Poonawalla, director of the Serum Institute of India, tweeted to President Biden on April 16. “Your government has all the details.”

“The embargo is disastrous for low- and middle-income countries,” says Lawrence Goston, professor of international health law at Georgetown University. “Especially for countries like India, which could be the big drivers of global immunization.”

Many developing countries say the United States and other wealthy Western countries could quickly increase the global vaccine supply if they temporarily suspend the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies. This would allow poorer countries to produce their own version of brand name vaccines, like Pfizer and Moderna.

In March, the United States, Britain and members of the European Union blocked a World Trade Organization (WTO) proposal that had the support of 80 countries and that proposed exempt vaccine patents from protection. The WTO will raise the issue again in May. A group of North American senators, led by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin, as well as several former heads of state and Nobel laureates, have also called on President Biden to support a temporary release of patents.

Nicholas Lusiani, senior advisor to Oxfam America, an NGO fighting poverty, said a meeting last week with officials in Biden’s government gave indications of a possible 180 degree turn and that he would support suspension of patents. Lusiani says Washington is also considering supporting an ambitious program to fund vaccine manufacturing centers in Africa and Latin America.

“In recent weeks, there has been a wave of support for a measure the United States never thought it would take: the temporary suspension of patent rights,” Lusiani says.

White House source declined to say whether Biden would support possible exemption from vaccine patentsBut last week, speaking at a virtual WTO summit, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai hinted that things cannot continue as they have been.

“It’s not just a challenge for governments,” Tai said. “This challenge also applies to the industry responsible for the development and manufacture of vaccines.”

Biden on Wednesday left open the possibility of making direct vaccine donations to Covax, but did not outline a timeline or reference a strategy for sharing the surplus the United States has, which by the middle of this year it could reach 300 million doses or more, according to estimates by researchers at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Duke University.

The vaccine gap is not just between the rich and the poor, but also between wealthy neighbors. Canada has signed advance purchase agreements with various pharmaceutical companies for hundreds of millions of doses – several times more than what it needs for its 38 million people. But its ability to manufacture coronavirus vaccines nationwide has been severely limited.and now the Canadians look with envy and a little resentment on their neighbors to the south.

“These situations serve to see who your friends and enemies really are,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford told reporters last month, suggesting Washington, “our closest friend,” should help more. “I thought the new government would make some sort of change, but now it always ends up being the One Who Can Save Himself!”

The Washington Post

Translation of Jaime Arrambide

The Washington Post