By Adalberto Santana on February 23, 2021
Soberana 2 production in Cuba, Photo: Alejandro Azcuy
As February ends the international scenario of the COVID-19 pandemic has the central task of immunizing more than 7 billion people in the entire world. This is a difficult challenge that 21st Century society must undertake, overcoming the fierce obstacles offered by the global scene. Particularly those obstacles presented by the policies of those governments of Western powers that are not doing everything humanly desirable to overcome the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
This is why the government of Mexico condemned the hoarding of the vaccines by the producer countries in the General Security Council of the United Nations session on February 17. This point was accentuated when the Mexican Chancellor, Marcelo Ebrard Casaubón, called upon the international community to prevent the “cornering” of vaccines and also to accelerate the delivery of these products to the Global Access Fund for COVID-19 vaccines – COVAX. This is an urgent and necessary task for all countries in the world, giving support of the most vulnerable as a priority. We believe that the poorest sectors of the world are also those who have the least ability to overcome the pandemic. Without the eradication of COVID-19 in those areas, the spread of the virus will not halt in the world. Their vulnerability in the midst of the pandemic will spread rapidly everywhere in this increasingly globalized world. We should remember that between February of 1918 and April of 1920, exactly 101 years ago, the whole world suffered from one of the worst recorded pandemics, when the spread of the so-called “Spanish Influenza” caused more than 50 million deaths. At the time, the world population was approximately 1.9 billion inhabitants.
At the present time, according to the estimates of Johns Hopkins University, at a worldwide level, the number of people infected is close to 112 million and the number of dead stands at 2.5 million people. This toll has been accumulated in just over a year of spread of COVID-19. If we think about other periods of history, especially when European colonizers arrived in the so-called “New World,” they unleashed a germ warfare that dramatically slaughtered the legitimate owners of these lands – as Simon Bolivar, the Great Liberator, correctly characterized them in his “Letter from Jamaica.” With the so-called “discovery” of the West Indies, a conservative estimate of the loss of life is 40 million people, leaving much of the New World depopulated.
What is certain is that the epidemics arrived in great waves, causing irreversible harm to the indigenous peoples: the Swine Flu (1493), Smallpox (1518-1526) measles (1530-1532, 1559, 1563-1564 and 1595), chicken-pox (1538) Influenza (1558-1559), typhus or pulmonary plague (1545-1548 and 1576-1580), mumps (1550), whooping cough (1562, plague (1560-1561 and1587-1595), diphtheria, etc. The mortality was horrifying, just as it was two centuries later on the Australian continent, although by that time the mechanisms of disease transmission were known and some vaccines existed.
In the present time, the most human desire and longing is for this pandemic to be eradicated. The strategy for the Western and most developed countries has been to immunize their populations first, essentially forgetting about the rest of the world. Due to this, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has sounded the alarm about the fact that 75% of all vaccine doses administered have been in only about a dozen countries. In addition to that, in 130 countries no vaccines have been administered at all. Which is to say that the access to vaccine has been concentrated in the richest countries in the world.
The Mexican diplomat put his finger firmly on the problem when he mentioned this exclusion and pointed out that the countries with fewest resources – which are those with the most deprived populations, both economically and socially – “will have no generalized access (to vaccines) until the middle of 2023.” This situation again demonstrates that, just as in the colonial period of our Americas, those who are excluded in times of neoliberalism in the 21st Century are the ones medically most vulnerable.
In other words, we are calling attention to the fact that there is a great monopoly of vaccines, generated by the wealth of the most developed nations in the capitalist world. Only the actions of some nations, such as Russia and the People’s Republic of China, have considered vaccines against COVID-19 as a part of the public goods. Thanks to this policy, some countries of mid-level development and others that are part of the so-called Third World have been able to gain access to vaccination. The Russian vaccine Sputnik V of the Gamaleya Institute has been approved for administration in more than 27 countries, including Russian itself, Serbia, Argentina, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Mexico, among others. In addition, the Ad5-nCoV, produced by the Biotechnology Institute of Beijing and by CanSino Biologics, has been used in China and distributed in Turkey, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile, as well as a number of Third World countries.
We should point out that the agreement between the governments of Presidents Andrés Manuel López Obrador of México and Alberto Fernandez of Argentina for the production and distribution of AstraZeneca and University of Oxford vaccines (notable for being produced on a non-profit basis) throughout nations of the Americas. In a similar manner, the advances in public health policy of the Cuban Revolution stand out; due to their spirit of solidarity and the development of their biopharmaceutical industry, they have been able to achieve the creation of four vaccines: Soberana 01, Soberana 02, Abdala, and Mambisa. The second of these vaccines, developed by the Finlay Vaccine Institute, is in phase III of clinical trials, in which more than 42,000 citizens of Cuba and Iran will participate, starting on March 1. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel has said, “Soberana 2 is being produced on a large scale in the National Center for Biological Preparations (Biocen), a scientific institute of CubaBioFarma with 30 years of experience in vaccine production. Administering three doses of the vaccine will generate permanent immunity.”
So the demand of all the peoples and the countries of our Americas and of the surrounding world should be nothing less than Vaccines for the good of all!
Source: Telesur, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau