Vaccine equity?

Vincent J. Curtis

6 Dec 21

RE: Time to unite and fight global vaccine inequity.  Op-ed by Vardit Ravitsky, Bio-ethics professor at University of Montreal and Harvard University. The Hamilton Spectator 6 Dec 21..

What’s with all the Marxism?  Fight and unite over vaccine inequity?  I thought Marxists knew something about economics! Has crypto-currency dulled their interest in market and labour conditions?

Let’s begin at the beginning.  The vaccines did not come into full production until early this year.  If 100 million doses were made per month, with seven billion people on earth, it would take six years to give everyone one dose.  Safe vaccines require exceptionally clean production conditions, and the production facilities require special approvals by relevant authorities to ensure that people won’t be injected with poison.  Besides that, you need hundreds of millions of tiny glass bottles, aluminum rings, septums, all in a sterile production line, and hypodermics to administer vaccines.  I can tell you that rural western Canada has low rates of vaccination because vaccines just aren’t distributed outside of urban areas.

Yet, we’re informed that hateful wealthy countries – the ones that developed the vaccines and are now producing them – jumped the line and purchased most of the world’s vaccines (well, who else will to ensure start-up of full production?), and that this global inequity is ethically despicable.  The crass ignorance of the bioethics prof of production is utterly disqualifying.  He may have credentials, but they aren’t in production engineering!

You know what’s ethically despicable? – the Soviet gulag system and the Uighur re-education camps.  It’s also ethically despicable to suggest that African countries can produce their own vaccines just like that.  Sorry, not even Canada is producing its own vaccines because we lack the pharmaceutical infrastructure.  (Late in the day, Merck announed a $19 million investment in Canada to produce vaccines.) We contracted with China to produce a vaccine, and that didn’t work out.

COVID is not a big deal in Africa.  Africa is a young continent, and young people don’t need vaccination.  It’s not that widespread.  Namibia has had 400 total cases since March, 2020.   And the vaccines lose effectiveness after six months, so what’s the point?  Never mind that distribution of vaccines into countries like the Congo, Sudan, Ethiopia, The Central African Republic, Rwanda, Libya, and a host of others is fraught with problems of war and corruption.  There’s no guarantee that shipping vaccines to Africa will get to people, and won’t wind up enriching guerrilla movements and corrupt officials everywhere.  Our bioethicist takes no account of this.  We have to just “unite and fight.”

Unsurprisingly, the west is menaced with novel variants of the virus, and they want a $10 billion per year contribution from western nations to some sort of insurance fund.  Yeah.

Marxist analysis is ethically despicable.

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