The World Health Organization’s COVAX, an abbreviation for COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access, warned that “no one is until everyone is in order,” but colonial attitudes are an impediment to controlling the global pandemic.
COVID-19 has shown that global equity and inclusion are needed to manage global crises. A major lesson of this pandemic is the desire to decolonize transnational governance so that the global is greater to manage existing and long-term global crises and problems.
The naïve failure of COVAX
COVAX failed.
It was intended to provide vaccines globally and equitably and to serve as a mechanism through which rich and poor countries would have access to vaccines. More than 80 percent of the population in rich countries is fully vaccinated, compared to less than 10 percent. of the population in poor countries.
Credible reports imply that deficient countries have been the most affected by the global pandemic, either in terms of mortality and economically.
This summer, we are witnessing new pandemic waves in Europe and Asia through new variants of SARS-CoV-2 detected for the first time in South Africa.
COVAX is based on high ideals of equity and social justice. The initiative was mandatory to bridge the gap between rich and deficient countries, which would have been less successful if it had not been launched.
But covax has been said to be naïve because it depends on countries’ willingness to invest and their willingness to wait patiently for doses from their own populations.
COVAX’s intentions had to coexist with the “stronger” policy. Rich countries have made their own deals and bought giant quantities of vaccines before they are available.
Vaccine nationalism has turned COVAX into a charity corridor. The colonial mentality thinks it’s okay to make deals with Big Pharma to get doses of vaccines from poor and populated countries, and donate their expired remains to them at a charity. road.
Colonial mentality
World capitalism as we know it grew out of a colonial global order established for the exploitation of other people and land. European countries kidnapped Africans and enslaved them while dispossessing other indigenous people. This created today’s extractive economy.
Racial classifications and racism have remained an enduring facet of the fashionable world. Colonialism produced the initial and existing hole between the world and the deficient, and racialized the latter. When the mercantilist order of the colonial era became capitalism in the nineteenth century, colonialism maintained the mentality that simply assumes European superiority.
This is the basis of the colonial dominance of the West and the United States in the kind of transnational governance that emerged after World War II (the United Nations and the Bretton Woods organizations, in addition to the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization). Bank). This is also the basis of today’s colonial mentality.
COVAX designed at the rich World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020. When news of the virus broke in China, two professional white men drank whiskey and imagined COVAX in a bar in a Swiss ski resort.
Seth Berkley (CEO of the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, or Gavi) and Richard Hatchett (CEO of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI), leaders of global immunization networks, discussed pandemic scenarios. They knew that the world would want a strategy of investment and distribution of shots, so they thought of a global solution.
Hatchett wrote a white paper in March 2020 and those concepts served as the basis for the creation of COVAX in April of the same year. This all sounds good, but the colonial mentality in the end prevented the good fortune of his initiative. This has prevented COVAX from emerging as the coordinator of the much-needed solidarity of the twenty-first century.
Decolonizing governance
People rarely hear the names of Berkley and Hatchett in the global public sphere. Berkley’s Gavi is a global vaccine alliance that combines the public and personal sectors. Hatchett’s CEPI describes itself as a “global partnership between public, personal, philanthropic and civil society. “organizations”.
Today, those two organizations, supported through the World Health Organization, are facing the ongoing pandemic. But their transparency and accountability are questionable.
Gavi designed COVAX without supervision and “with a small organization of like-minded advisors, mostly philanthropists, academics and experts from the global North,” according to a report by Médecins Sans Frontières. The perspectives of low- and middle-income countries, civil society organizations or regional disease teams were not taken into account significantly.
At the same time, representatives of the pharmaceutical industry had a seat at the primary decision-making debate table, which helped the prestige quo of their intellectual asset rights.
The global will have to move beyond the myopic national interest. It has become transparent that in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, equity and inclusion are urgently needed.
Scientists expect new pandemics as well as crises similar to climate change. This will be the last global public fitness emergency.
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