Thread by @MMKavanagh

Is it “not clear that 'coloniality' is the cause” of COVID19 vaccine inequality? Maybe not for many (helpful article in that sense), let's discuss.
THREAD🧵#decolonizing starting w political economy: $trillions for North's corporate, R&D, university "capacity" has an origin.../1

https://twitter.com/seyeabimbola/status/1484624326121111553

First: colonialism was a system of resource extraction, slave trade, and global commerce that enriched the global North and has had long-running harm for Southern economies… inequality in resources is not naturally occurring/2

Empiricaly clear e.g. Nunn "the world’s current income differences could be explained by the divergent effects of European contact globallty, which resulted in a massive transfer of disease, food, ideas, and people.../3
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Don't love economics literature that mirrors neocolonial tropes, but long-running effects of colonialism and slave trade are really clear: impact on today's domestic & global economies
e.g. Oasis Kodila-Tedika, Albert Tcheta-Bampa, Patrick Lusenge-Ndungo/4 papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

...and this extraction continues. Every year trillions in wealth moves from the global South to the global North through a wide variety of mechanisms and a value chain that continues the global economic inequalities born from colonial period...
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

But isn't this thread about COVID-19 vaccines? Yes: When #COVID19 hit, why did high-income countries have the world's best funded universities, billions on hand to dump into creating vaccines, and unlimited coffers to buy them up? Why didn't the South? Colonialism./6

Of course things are of course more complicated than that, but this is twitter and you get my point (that's why I sent links). So, moving on... /7

What about global plans to distribute vaccines? Did we just have no good ideas? Nope: Southern leaders including Sall/Senegal, Khan/Pakistan, Akufo-Addo/Ghana, Ramaphosa/SAfrica put out a vision of sharing technology, leveraging expertise in 2020.../8

https://twitter.com/MMKavanagh/status/1386683754693935104?s=20

Yet in the centers of global health, as has been widely reported, African, Asian, and Latin American leaders played little role in creating the institutional response.../9
nytimes.com/2021/08/02/wor…

Why? Might this have something to do with it? /10
👇

https://twitter.com/paimadhu/status/1316918782317760519?s=20

...and if so, might 👆reality of the racial, geographic, and gender context of global health leadership (more heads of global health agencies that went to Harvard than are Southern women?) have something to do with colonial legacies? How could it not? /11

Today's most powerful universities largely depend on a history and legacy of colonialism. Some more directly than others. My institution has been grappling for years with the reality that the continued existence of the University depended on slavery.../12
nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/…

Meanwhile, back to vaccines for a minute... global health has not been neutral and cannot be divorced, even today, from history of tropical medicine.... Evidence? Why yes.../13

"1921-1956, W.African villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications by colonial govts with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects...Turning to today, greater campaign exposure reduces vaccination rates and trust in medicine.../14
pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10…

So: Which countries are wealthy, with $ to create & buy vaccines is empirically linked to long-term effects of colonialism-->is major determinant of vaccine coverage today-->is linked to who is seen as having "capacity" and expertise.
Yes, #Decolonize /fin