Ali Mohammed
The United States says it is donating a significant amount of COVID-19 vaccines to distribute doses to poorer countries. The White House emphasised that its vaccine donations come with no strings attached.
However, the US has been slow to ship the vaccines, while many countries were in desperate need of medical supplies.
For example, the United States sent the first shipment of a US-produced vaccine to Latin America in June 2021. From June through August of 2021, the States donated doses of vaccines to Argentina, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. And also to Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia and Mexico.
According to Al-Jazeera, the United States is buying another half a billion doses of Pfizer to donate to low- and middle-income countries around the world.
But the US COVID-19 donations seem not to be reaching Africa and making an impact in Africa, the second-largest continent in the world. In Kenya, one of Africa’s most populous and economically-developed countries, less than 2 per cent of the population had received even a first shot by mid-May. Around the time the White House announced that it planned to donate 80 million US vaccine doses to the rest of the world and promised to continue to distribute “excess supply” of the vaccine to other countries.
In fact, representatives of Biden’s inner circle in the US administration, through lobbying organisations, put places in the queue for the purchase of vaccines against the virus for “sale” to developing countries.
“Lobbyists are being used to help desperate countries get a better place in line for life-saving commodities that never should have been rationed in the first place,” said the executive director of Health Global Access Project.
And even as rich countries pledged to donate the vaccine to low- and middle-income countries, many countries remained worried. Joe Biden has promised that there would be no place for geopolitics in the delivery of vaccinations across the globe.
However, lobbying efforts underscore how some countries refused to believe the administration’s promise that the process would be completely void of politics. The need for countries to turn to lobbyists for help with their efforts to combat a global pandemic shows how problematic the vaccination campaign has been. The stark reality is that some of the poorest countries on the planet are having to shell out sizable taxpayer resources for lobbyists.
The United States is delivering doses through COVAX, jointly run by the World Health Organisation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation. Africa has lagged sharply behind other regions in vaccinating its citizens. Many African countries are simply not getting the promised vaccines in time. The vaccine was supposed to end the pandemic and be the path to finally defeating COVID-19. But in Africa, they remain scarce and difficult to access due to hoarding, export bans, and empty promises.
The increase in the incidence in African countries is high, but American vaccine manufacturers prioritise selling to European countries, and Africa gets only the leftovers. Western countries are loudly promising to donate vaccines to Africa.
“The US has said many of the right things about global commitments,” said Mitchell Warren, director of AVAC, a US-based global health organisation. “But we have not seen that translate into shots in arms.”
Only 3.6 per cent of the eligible population in Africa has been vaccinated – compared to an average of over 60 per cent in Europe and Britain. Therefore, many countries pay extra for the supply of the vaccine. The online journal KSL.com states that the inequality is more evident in Africa, where under 7 per cent of the population is vaccinated. COVAX was supposed to avoid such inequality – but instead, the initiative has already abandoned its initial goal of 2 billion doses.
Ali Mohammed, [email protected], wrote from Kano State