Trying to fight a global pandemic with vaccine nationalism is like trying to get rid of cockroaches in your house by only killing them in your bathroom.
We're creating a world in which a few countries will always be fighting over scarce supplies of new vaccines to combat new variants…
…while most countries will have no access or delayed access to vaccines, leaving billions of bodies for new variants to form in.
Cui bono?
If the production of approved vaccines is currently too slow to keep up with the rate of new resistant strains emerging, then the world absolutely must boost production capacity.
Yet, some countries are still blocking wider production of vaccines... hrw.org/news/2021/03/0…
12 days ago, EU Commission President @vonderleyen said she was “not ruling out” going so far as to waive intellectual property rights on vaccines: politico.eu/newsletter/bru…
11 March 2025: On the 5th anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, commemorations are happening around the globe to mourn the loss of over 51 million people…
On the 1st anniversary back in 2021, when “only” 2.6 million deaths had been recorded, many people thought they could see the light at the end of the tunnel…
Vaccines had been developed by pharmaceutical companies in record time – with the help of billions in public money – and some people had already been fully vaccinated within one year. It seemed to many like a remarkable achievement.
I know some folks in the human rights community get a bit annoyed with me when I bring in practicality-based arguments to convince people of the need for a human rights approach to a problem. But in my experience, legal and moral arguments don't convince all audiences.
Take the issue of torture, for example. You can explain that it's illegal in international & national law, and you can say that it's just wrong - and I agree, of course - but those arguments don't convince some people.
So, you also remind them that torture doesn't work: people will say anything to stop being tortured, whether it's true or not, so it doesn't deliver reliable information. And torture is also counter-productive: it acts as a recruiting poster for your country's enemies.