Vaccine Nationalism

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The All India Peoples Science Network  stated that vaccine nationalism was a “wholly misconceived” idea and it must be given up.

• The AIPSN called for increasing the vaccine doses available in the country to step up the vaccination programme.
• It also cautioned that modalities of import, pricing and distribution must be designed to allow all access to the vaccines.

About Vaccine Nationalism

• Vaccine nationalism occurs when a country manages to secure doses of vaccine for its own citizens or residents before they are made available in other countries and this is done through pre-purchase agreements between a government and a vaccine manufacturer.

• Currently, most countries in the world are dealing with the lack of a vaccine for coronavirus, there are some countries that are also hoarding the vaccine.

Precedents of such pre-booking of vaccines in other outbreaks

• In 2009, following an outbreak of H1N1 influenza, or swine flu, rich countries had hoarded vaccines in a way similar to the pre-booking happening now.
  • As a result, many countries in Africa had no access to these vaccines for months.
  • The US and some European countries finally agreed to release 10% of their stocks for other countries, but only after it had become evident that they did not need the vaccines for themselves any longer.

• Similarly, anti-retroviral drugs for the treatment of HIV patients were unavailable in Africa, the worst affected region, for several years after being developed in the 1990s.

Concerns

• The World Health Organisation (WHO) has expressed its concerns about this and there are fears that such unilateral deals with wealthy countries will make the vaccines inaccessible to those in some of the poorest parts of the world.
• The concern over less wealthy countries not having access to a vaccine is a serious one.

                                                                             Source: Business LIVE

Measures

• The World Health Organization (WHO), along with some other international alliances, hae launched a platform called ACT (or Access to Covid19 Tools) Accelerator Programme.
  • Its objective is to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines, and also therapeutics and drugs. The vaccine part of the programme is called the COVAX facility.
  • COVAX is supposed to invest money into the leading candidate vaccines to accelerate their development and production.
  •  It also has another important objective — to ensure that the successful vaccines are made equally accessible to all, at an affordable price.
  •  It seeks to achieve this by ensuring that all participating countries are provided supplies to cover at least 20% of their populations, at a uniform price.

• China and India are amongst the few countries that are working to assist the global vaccination effort, especially in developing and low-income countries.

Source :TH