Thread by @aaronsibarium

To hear the media tell it, the emergence of the Omicron variant in South Africa is the direct result of "vaccine hoarding" by Western countries. As @DrewHolden360 and I explain in the Free Beacon, this narrative is mostly false.

freebeacon.com/coronavirus/th…

@DrewHolden360 Five of the eight countries from which the Biden administration has suspended travel have pumped the brakes on new vaccine shipments because the countries have more doses than health officials can administer. That's a tragedy, but it's not due to vaccine hoarding.

Vaccine hesitancy is widespread across Africa. A recent survey that spans five West African countries found that 6 in 10 people were vaccine hesitant—compared with 13 percent or less in France, the United Kingdom, and other parts of Europe and 27 percent in the United States.

Another study of six African countries found that <50% of respondents said they would definitely or probably get the vaccine. Western disinformation, spread across the world on social media, may have contributed to these attitudes. But again: the problem is not vaccine hoarding.

In Zimbabwe, even getting health care workers vaccinated is a challenge. The president of the 12,000-member Zimbabwe Nurses Association said in February that "the uptake of the vaccine is low among health workers" because "people are reluctant.”

thezimbabwemail.com/health/nurses-…

The dominant media narrative that suggests Western governments are hoarding vaccines also overlooks the early investments by the United States and the United Kingdom to ensure their citizens had access to vaccines that helped facilitate access to vaccines.

These countries invested millions of dollars to help finance the vaccines on the condition that their citizens—whose tax dollars provided the down payment—would have access. As I noted in April, Brexit is a big part of what enabled the UK to do this.

freebeacon.com/coronavirus/ho…

This "vaccine nationalism" helped reduce transmission and death from COVID-19 in these countries while speeding up vaccines that would eventually be rolled out across the globe.

Less nationalistic approaches, by contrast, have had a less than stellar track record.

The European Union's vaccine procurement strategy, based around "equitable" coordination between member states, led to needless bureaucracy and delays as the pandemic raged. Again, see my piece from April: freebeacon.com/coronavirus/ho…

Lofty goals of a global, coordinated effort, known as COVAX, have failed to produce results, falling short on their projected number of vaccines by hundreds of millions. Thousands of vaccines in Africa have already been thrown away because they expired in transit.

In poor countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the main barriers to vaccination are a weak health care system and underdeveloped infrastructure, which make it difficult to distribute doses before they expire.

And researchers are now discovering that the Omicron variant was in the Netherlands—a country with a 70-percent vaccination rate and no issues in acquiring vaccines—a week before its discovery in South Africa. npr.org/2021/11/30/106…

The fact that we don't even know for sure where the variant originated (yes, probably Africa, but it's clearly been circulating for a while under the radar) muddles the current origin story being used to criticize American decision-making.

So the next time you hear from the mainstream media about the rapaciousness of the West when it comes to COVID vaccines, remember the details they're leaving out. freebeacon.com/coronavirus/th…