One of the appalling things about the current pandemic is the great inequality in vaccine availability around the globe, highlighting once more how the wealthy nations are able to corner the market on valuable resources. In this case, since many of the companies that are the biggest producers of vaccines are private ones and they seek to make as much money as they can, they have entered into contracts to mostly supply wealthy nations like the US that are able to pay more, while the WHO consortium that sought to provide vaccines to poorer countries through its COVAX program has found it hard to get adequate supplies.
Safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines were developed in record time. But the virus is moving faster than the global distribution of vaccines. The vast majority have been administered in high- and upper-middle-income countries. If these doses had been distributed equitably, they would have been enough to cover all health workers and older people globally.
WHO set a target for all countries to vaccinate 10% of their populations by the end of September. 56 countries effectively excluded from the global vaccine marketplace were not able to reach this target – and most of them in Africa.
Even more countries are at risk of missing the WHO targets of vaccinating 40% of the population of every country by the end of this year, and 70% by the middle of next year.
Most manufacturers have largely spurned the opportunities to share technology and know-how and public health-oriented licensing, despite a number of mechanisms being set up including the COVID-19 Technology Access Pool and the mRNA vaccine technology transfer hub, which is now moving ahead in South Africa.
The global failure to share vaccines equitably is taking its toll on some of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people. New variants of concern mean that the risks of infection have increased in all countries for people who are not yet protected by vaccination.
…We can only achieve our targets if the countries and companies that control vaccine supply put contracts for COVAX and the African Vaccine Acquisition Trust – or AVAT – first for deliveries and donated doses.
Reader Birger Johansson sent me a link to this article from Nature that says that Cuba, the victim of a brutal, vindictive, and irrational US-led boycott that is a relic of the Cold War, decided to develop its own vaccines and that effort seems to be paying off.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Cuba decided not to wait on the rest of the world to develop vaccines. The United States’ 60-year-old economic embargo against the country, which prevents US-made products from being exported there, would make it difficult for Cuba to acquire vaccines and therapies, researchers and officials knew. “It was best, for protecting our population, to be independent,” says Vicente Vérez Bencomo, director-general of the Finlay Institute of Vaccines in Havana.
So the Finlay Institute and Cuba’s other state-run biotechnology centres started developing their own COVID-19 vaccines in the hope that at least one of them would be effective. Their bet seems to be paying off: in a 6 November preprint published on medRxiv1, Vérez Bencomo and his colleagues report that one of the institute’s vaccines, Soberana 02, is more than 90% effective in protecting against symptomatic COVID-19 infection when used in combination with a related vaccine. Importantly, the combination seems to be effective against the highly transmissible Delta variant of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, which has caused surges in hospitalizations and death across the world and now accounts for nearly all COVID-19 cases in Cuba.
As of 18 November, 89% of Cuba’s population — including children as young as 2 — has received at least one dose of Soberana 02 or another Cuban vaccine called Abdala, which is produced at the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) in Havana. The centre reported in July that Abdala, a three-dose vaccine, was more than 92% effective in phase III trials that included more than 48,000 participants, but the full results have not yet been published.
Cuba’s regulatory agency authorized Abdala and Soberana 02 shots for use in adults in July and August respectively, and health-care workers began immunizing children with both vaccines a few months later. The country has begun exporting the two home-grown vaccines to Venezuela, Vietnam, Iran and Nicaragua. And it has asked the World Health Organization to approve its vaccines — an important step towards making them available throughout the developing world.
It is astonishing that Cuba, a country that is, thanks to the US, starved of the kind of normal economic and other exchanges with the world, has acquired the scientific expertise and infrastructure to not only develop vaccines and supply them to their own population, but also to provide them to other countries.
Science and technology needs to be democratized so that the developed world cannot continue to be the biggest beneficiaries of its advantages.
It is astonishing that Cuba, a country that is, thanks to the US, starved of the kind of normal economic and other exchanges with the world, has acquired the scientific expertise and infrastructure to not only develop vaccines and supply them to their own population, but also to provide them to other countries.
Not really astonishing. Cuba, almost from the Revolution, has been heavily investing in drug research and and production. Something to do with problems accessing drugs overseas, I believe.
I think that the leading revolutionaries, especially Fidel Castro, also put a huge emphasis on health care over as a basic human right.
Supplying them to other countries just is a continuation of medical aid that Cuba has been doing for many years. It has trained a lot of doctors from a lot of poor countries at its own expense.
ITs medical aid has earned Cuba a lot of good will and, in the case of doctors serving overseas, quite a lot of hard currency.
IIRC they even sent a medical team to Italy last year.
BTW, the Finlay Institute is named after an American who fought and died in the Cuban war of independence from Spain.
Cuba has also had a lot of progressive ecological ideas. Unable to depend on gasoline to run farm equipment or commercial fertilizers, they focused on sustainable practices.
Too bad half the world would starve under your “sustainable practices”. We cannot feed the world without inorganic fertilizers. There’s not enough land. So please stop accidentally advocating for mass genocide via ridiculous pseudoscience theories like what happened during the worst of the Soviet Union, see Lysenkoism.
GoTS>
holy fuck, would you give it a rest for once? No one is saying everyone should do what Cuba does, we are just discussing how they’ve overcome some very significant difficulties that are pretty much primarily caused by the pointless U.S. embargo and sanctions.
You’re single-handedly causing a hay and straw shortage with that nonsense.
@4
NO DONT YOU UNDERSTAND THE WHOLE WORLD WILL DIE UNLESS WE ALL START EATING ONLY REFINED URANIUM
You’re praising going backwards technologically. We’ve already seen the immense harms of praising shit like this. This pseudoscience anti-human attitude is the single biggest cause behind ongoing hunger in Africa.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1997/01/forgotten-benefactor-of-humanity/306101/
I have no intention of staying silent on this issue against what I consider to be perhaps the greatest threat to human flourishing. Don’t care if you don’t like it.
Sure, Gerrard. Sustainability is anathema to you.
You’ve made it clear that you are a Luddite, opposing new and advanced technologies, including the “green” synthesis of basic chemicals like urea and ammonia.
So yeah, keep spruiking unsustainable technologies, well-received as your recidivism is.
(You don’t have to stay silent, but neither do I nor others)
Well, I think it is fantastic that Cuba can give the USA the finger again.
The USA does not give a fuck about it’s own people so gives less than no fucks for Cuba or the rest of us if you think about it (obviously I include the resident racist arsehole whose name will not be spoken when I say “USA”).
How dare the Cubans find a way, in the face of illegal blockades by the USA, to not starve to death, using methods that do not pass HIS exacting standard of being from a citable scientific publication, especially from a scientist from a different discipline to the subject at hand, which is HIS favourite mode.
HE obviously thinks that Cuba has imperialist ambitions, wanting to drag the world down into “poverty”. Remember, HE thinks that anyone not living a middle class USA lifestyle is living in poverty.
Look around you, arsehole. Humanity is not fliurishing. It is in the process of slashing it’s own wrists.
Star Trek is not a fucking documentary…..so shut the fuck up.
GerrardofTitanicStupidity is now sounding like the LaRouchies of the 1970s and 1980s: it’s either nuclear power and nothing else for everyone, no questions asked, or “genocide.” Go fuck yourself, Gerrard, the last time you piped up about this, you were found to be lying about what your own sources actually said. In addition to completely refusing to understand what actually happened at Chernobyl, or what the Soviets had to do about it. YOU HAVE NO CREDIBILITY.
Also, we;’e talking about CUBA, not “what happened during the worst of the Soviet Union,” which was, you know, STALINISM? Two different countries, two different periods, remember? I don’t remember Stalin launching any crash-programs to build wind-turbines or solar-panels…