Toward ‘Vaccine Internationalism’: The Need for an Equitable and Coordinated Global Vaccination Approach to Effectively Combat COVID-19 (original) (raw)

The Race for Global Equitable Access to COVID-19 Vaccines

Vaccines

COVID-19 vaccines are possibly the most effective medical countermeasures to mitigate and ultimately bring to a halt the COVID-19 pandemic. As we transition to endemicity, inequitable access to vaccines, and particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), still poses risks of unprecedented disruptions and the emergence of viral mutations, which potentially lead to notorious vaccine-resistant variants. The missteps learned from the previous responses to the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and influenza outbreaks founded the hypothetical plan to ensure that vaccine accessibility to LMICs is not impeded. The SARS-CoV-2 vaccines’ social promise was to lessen the underlying racial, ethnic, and geographic inequities that COVID-19 has both made apparent and intensified. Vaccine nationalism was evident throughout the COVID-19 crisis. Many high-income countries directly negotiated large advance orders for the vaccines, leaving resource-limited countries scrambling for access. Th...

The Challenge of Vaccine Nationalism

University of Toronto Journal of Public Health, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on global health for almost two years, resulting in nearly 200 million cases and over 4 million deaths worldwide. Despite a range of non-invasive public health measures, (i.e. physical distancing, and masks) vaccines have been one of the more critical and effective interventions to slow the pandemic. Produced at record-breaking speeds, the highly efficacious mRNA vaccines represented hope for many. Including global health organizations who have called for strategies to maximize vaccine equity since their conception. While many high-income countries (HICs) agreed to prioritize global vaccine equity; in truth, individual health outweighed community health. The reality of HICs vaccine purchasing behaviors and distribution have exposed a different agenda - one that aligns with a neoliberal emphasis on individuals and profits at the expense of global good. This commentary questions the efficacy of global health agreements and the commitm...

Vaccination Worldwide: Strategies, Distribution and Challenges

2021

The Coronavirus 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus represents an unprecedented crisis for our planet. It is a bane of the über connected world that we live in that this virus has affected almost all countries and caused mortality and economic upheaval at a scale whose effects are going to be felt for generations to come. While we can all be buoyed at the pace at which vaccines have been developed and brought to market, there are still challenges ahead for all countries to get their populations vaccinated equitably and effectively. This paper provides an overview of ongoing immunization efforts in various countries. In this early draft, we have identified a few key factors that we use to review different countries’ current COVID-19 immunization strategies and their strengths and draw conclusions so that policymakers worldwide can learn from them. Our paper focuses on processes related to vaccine approval, allocation and prioritization, distribution strategies, po...

COVID-19 Pandemic and Equal Access to Vaccines

Vaccines

The COVID-19 pandemic has evidenced the chronic inequality that exists between populations and communities as regards global healthcare. Vaccination, an appropriate tool for the prevention of infection, should be guaranteed by means of proportionate interventions to defeat such inequality in populations and communities affected by a higher risk of infection. Equitable criteria of justice should be identified and applied with respect to access to vaccination and to the order in which it should be administered. This article analyzes, as regards the worldwide distribution of anti-COVID-19 vaccines, the various ways the principle of equity has been construed and applied or even overlooked. The main obstacle to equal access to vaccines is vaccine nationalism. The perception of equity varies with the differing reference values adopted. Adequate response to needs appears to be the principal rule for achieving the criterion of equity in line with distributive justice. Priorities must be set...

Introduction to Global Vaccine Logics

Global Vaccine Logics, 2024

Medical anthropologists have long located their work at sites of illness, sickness, and disease, where people and their kin experience physical and highly emotional states of discomfort brought on by social, political, biological and environmental happenings. The collected papers in this Anthropologica thematic edition focus on how powerful global assemblages and political economies affect vaccine development, manufacture, regulation, and distribution in early twenty-first-century neoliberal technoscience and post-colonial cultures. This volume expands the social science scholarship on vaccines beyond ethnographic contributions to clinical studies of their pharmacological protective and therapeutic implications to reveal the global logics of vaccine making.