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By now, we all know the headlines, Israel and the United Arab Emirates are leading the world in vaccinating their citizens against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19). That two relatively wealthy and organized small countries are doing such a good job should be lauded and maybe, to the extent possible, studied so that the rest of us can learn how to do an effective and quick roll-out as well the next time around.
But let’s take those two out of the equation and look at the OECD or group of “rich” countries. Here we see more clearly that the United Kingdom and the United States are light years ahead of the rest of Western Europe (European Union) while Canada languishes near the bottom with Latvia and Mexico. So we are not doing a great job but neither is rest of Europe other than Britain. This is not terribly surprising given that the main vaccines out there are Moderna and Pfizer BioNTech (both American) and AstraZeneca (UK).
CNN ran a pretty good article explaining this “Vaccine rollout is a much-needed win for UK after bungling its pandemic response“.
But the [UK] government’s foresight in backing coronavirus vaccines has turned into one of the most surprising success stories of the pandemic. Despite its widely criticized pandemic response, which has led to more than 117,000 deaths and more than 4 million coronavirus cases to date, the UK has now administered 15 million coronavirus vaccine doses — a target set by the government to reach everyone in its top four priority groups by February 15. The groups include everyone over 70, frontline health and social care workers, those living in care homes and the clinically extremely vulnerable. This total is more than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Belgium combined.
The centralized NHS is key to getting shots in arms, but it was an early series of big bets on then-unproven vaccines that really vaulted the UK ahead of the global pack. Cautious not to repeat its PPE-purchasing mistakes and unwilling to rely solely on public servants who lacked expertise in vaccine procurement, Britain’s Chief Scientific Adviser Patrick Vallance pushed Downing Street to bring in outside experts to form the vaccine taskforce. On paper, the unusual combination of public servants and current and former industry insiders seems like a recipe for conflicts of interest, but they were accountable to ministers and government auditors, explains Bates, who left the committee last month. The taskforce was quick to get behind a vaccine being developed by a group of scientists at the University of Oxford who had been working on a shot for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — a disease caused by another type of coronavirus — before shifting their focus to Covid-19. It wasn’t long before a vaccine was developed, but the challenge would be getting it manufactured on an industrial scale, which is where AstraZeneca came in.
The British-Swedish pharmaceutical company was chosen because of its iron-clad commitment to prioritize the UK market, which, according to both parties, involved providing all doses made in the UK to the British government, and only exporting doses once the country had been supplied. In exchange, the UK government agreed to invest heavily in the vaccine’s manufacture. “I wasn’t going to settle for a contract that allowed the Oxford vaccine to be delivered to others around the world before us,” Health Secretary Matt Hancock told UK radio station LBC earlier this month… Last month AstraZeneca clarified that it never contractually promised Europe it would be supplied with doses at the same rate as the UK. “Basically, we said we’re going to try our best,” the company’s CEO Pascal Soriot explained to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
In other words, the two countries that are making the bulk of the three Western vaccines that are currently authorized (AstraZeneca has not been approved in Canada yet despite the WHO authorizing it yesterday) are prioritizing themselves well ahead of their friends and allies – don’t even think about what they think about supplying the rest of the world.
Moreover, of the two American vaccines that have been approved in Canada, rather than get our vaccines from the United States directly, which is right next door and our main trading partner; we have for some inexplicable reason, contracted to get them through their European subsidiary plants. Not surprisingly, we ran into problems like this Global News report, “Moderna joins Pfizer in cutting back on vaccine deliveries to Canada next week.” Given that the European Union ran into their own production problems that resulted in the so-called restriction on exports of Covid-19 vaccines made in the EU, it is not surprising that Canada then falls down the supply chain further which is why we are lagging even the laggard EU.
So essentially Trudeau screwed-up. Despite all the talk that “Canada has deals to buy more vaccine per capita than any other country in the world“, we never secured firm contracts (in hindsight, it now seems they are “best efforts” contracts) and were always at the mercy of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca who had already contracted to supply their home country first before exporting any excess. Trump may be gone but his “America First” mentality is not.
This doesn’t mean we won’t get vaccinated this year, we probably will eventually later on in the fall but well after the United States and the United Kingdom have finished with their mass vaccination programs. In the short-term, it is clear that we don’t have enough supply of vaccines which means we really have to get our priorities straight in limited vaccination roll-out. Instead, we have the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation waxing eloquently that, “Vaccination rate is 6 times higher in Indigenous communities than in general population.”
Indigenous Services Minister Marc Miller says the nationwide push to prioritize First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities for the COVID-19 vaccine is starting to bear fruit, and that vaccination rates in those communities are now significantly higher than those reported elsewhere.
According to the latest data, more than 83,000 doses have been administered so far in more than 400 Indigenous communities.
Twenty-five per cent of adults in these communities have received at least one shot — a rate six times higher than the one for the general population.
Miller said he expects most Indigenous adults to be vaccinated before the rest of the population — a goal, he added, that is rooted in science.
“It’s what we want,” Miller said, adding the territories and B.C. are on track to vaccinate 75 per cent of Indigenous adults by the end of March. The rest of the country isn’t expected to reach that milestone until sometime this summer.
Wait a second, why is this a goal “rooted in science?” I get the basic argument, that natives have been historically and are more likely to suffer health problems due to isolation, inadequacy of infrastructure (especially health care), etc. But that is also the case for many other visible minority group including blacks and south Asians as I pointed out in previously in this piece, “Politics and Pandemics – Covid 19 and Race.” So why the particular focus on Canadian indigenous populations? Precisely because it has everything to do with politics and little to do with science. If it was really about the science, the goal would be to vaccinate all elderly populations and front line essential workers (especially health care workers) first, not a particular ethnic subgroup. So by all means, prioritize elderly and front line natives first; but to say its scientific to vaccinate the entire adult native population before elderly white Canadians is complete bullshit – its political, not scientific.
In Germany, Bloomberg reports, “Merkel Says Germany Ready to Look at Russia’s Sputnik Vaccine” in response to their own failed vaccination rollout. I have no problem with this because as even CBC points out, “Lancet gives the nod to Russia’s coronavirus vaccine, giving a beleaguered Putin a soft-power victory.” I mean the headline is complete garbage laden with political prejudices but the facts are that Lancet, one of the most respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, reports “the vaccine is ‘safe and effective.’ While the journal noted Sputnik V’s development faced criticism for ‘an absence of transparency’ and ‘corner cutting,’ it said the vaccine maker, Moscow’s Gamaleya National Centre of Epidemiology and Microbiology, had, in fact, demonstrated solid scientific principles.” But sadly, it would seem, Trudeau has no interest in procuring it, maybe because he has already made so many other useless contracts to buy vaccines from other firms that haven’t been delivered.
While it is clear that the Western world, especially the United Kingdom and the United States, is playing vaccine nationalism, in the long-term, it only serves to undermine their already battered moral standing in the rest of the world. As Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on 20 January 2021, “I need to be blunt: the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure – and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries… He said over 39 million vaccine doses had been given in 49 richer states – but one poor nation had only 25 doses. It is not fair for younger, healthy people in richer nations to get injections before vulnerable people in poorer states.”
Tedros is correct but I cannot fault the leaders of Britain and America for putting their own citizens first. They are, after all, elected to represent the interest of their own people, not the world. At the same time, for British officials to come out so publicly and clearly and state that they are hoarding their vaccine for themselves first may play well for the domestic electorate but severely weakens their image in the eyes of the rest of the world.
Contrast the West’s vaccine “me first” nationalism and empty promises to help with that of China. Unreported in the Western propaganda… I mean media, this 15 February 2021 SCMP article, “China tilts to Covid-19 vaccine diplomacy as domestic jab programme lags“. “China appears to be giving more priority to vaccine diplomacy than its domestic inoculation programme, with Chinese pharmaceutical makers now exporting more Covid-19 doses than have been administered in the country. Figures compiled by the South China Morning Post show China shipped at least 46 million ready-made vaccines or their active ingredients around the world, as of Monday – with hundreds of millions more doses to come. In contrast, the country’s health authority said 40.52 million vaccine doses had been administered in China, as of February 9. The number was second only to the US, where more than 50 million jabs have been injected.” Of course, China has nearly 4x the population of the United States so its domestic vaccination rate is much lower; but it is still exporting more vaccine despite not having inoculating most of its own citizens first.
To be fair, there are still lingering doubts over the efficacy of the Chinese made vaccines (79% for Sinopharm, 50-91% for Sinovac, compare to the 62-90% for Oxford-AstraZeneca, 92% for Russia’s Sputnik-V and 95% reported by Pfizer and Moderna). It is interesting to note that wide ranges in efficacy from phase-III clinical trials is also due to the wide range reported in different countries and that phenomenon applies equally to the UK’s AstraZeneca vaccine as well. Sinopharm announced 79% efficacy but the UAE (remember the country that is second only to Israel in vaccination) reported 86% in it’s phase-III clinical trials. For Sinovac, Turkey, Indonesia and Brazil reported 91%, 65% and 50% efficacy rates respectively.
However, in the battle over vaccine diplomacy, it is clear that the Chinese and Russians have some big advantages of the technically sophisticated mRNA American vaccines. First, they do not require special cold storage and shipment. Second, they are much cheaper. Both are huge benefits when trying to get vaccines into the poorer developing parts of the world in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have limited logistics and medical infrastructure. More importantly, unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, at least the WHO (COVAX) and developing countries can get their hands on the Chinese vaccines while they are still watching the British boast about how they are so clever in hoarding vaccines for their own use first.
Update 1 (1 March 2021): Lest one think that this was merely a British phenomenon, we have this confirmation from the CBC, “Biden spokesperson rules out helping Canada, Mexico with vaccine supply before all Americans are inoculated“.
The White House spokesperson today ruled out sending vaccines to continental partners like Canada and Mexico, saying U.S. President Joe Biden is committed to getting every American vaccinated before sharing doses with other countries.
During a White House press briefing today, Jen Psaki was asked if Biden was considering sharing part of the U.S. COVID-19 vaccine supply with allies. “No,” she replied.
“The president has made clear that he is focused on ensuring that vaccines are accessible to every American. That is our focus,” she added.
