A volunteer receives a vaccine as part of a clinical trial in South Africa, June 24 2020.
Vaccine Nationalism Threatens COVID Recovery Keely Mullen
T
he COVID pandemic has laid bare the disastrous failures of Western capitalism. A new study has concluded that 40% of U.S. COVID deaths were avoidable. That’s hundreds of thousands of people who did not need to die. The E.U., U.S., and U.K. governments have all completely failed to contain the virus. Their overarching priority has been to restart the gas of global profit making for their own domestic capitalist class, which has led to a crazed loop of lockdowns and rushed reopenings. They have resorted to nationalistic resource hoarding, which has only made the crisis worse, allowing the virus to circulate and mutate in other parts of the world. Unfortunately, this is not the only pandemic we will see in our life times. Scientists predict that future pandemics will happen more often, spread faster, and kill more people. The exploitation of the planet due to capitalist “development” is what gave us COVID in the first place: deforestation and the disruption of wild habitats (always in the name of profit) increases contact between wildlife, livestock, pathogens and people and is a key driver of the spread of infection diseases. If ever there was a doubt that capitalism has outlived its usefulness, this crisis should clear that right up.
A move toward deglobalization has meant the narrow interests of national capitalist classes have taken precedence over a globally coordinated response to the pandemic. Early in the pandemic, the U.S. chose to forgo the World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVID testing technology in favor of a homemade Centers for Disease Control (CDC) test which was later recalled. This trend has only been exacerbated with the vaccination campaign where Western capitalist powers have hoarded vaccines, leaving much of the neocolonial world unprotected. The consequences of this approach are completely counter-productive. As much as national governments may want to, it is almost impossible to seal off your borders to the COVID threat. If the virus is allowed to circulate in any one part of the globe, acquiring dangerous new mutations, the rest of the world is at risk. Already the coronavirus variant in South Africa seems to be evading the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was heralded as the silver bullet for resolving outbreaks in the neocolonial world because it’s less expensive per dose than other vaccines. Bloomberg estimates that, at the current pace, it will take 6.6 years for the world to reach 75% immunity to COVID. Delivering vaccines to cover the 7.8 billion global population will be one of the greatest logistical challenges hu-
