Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

In sub-Saharan Africa, fewer than 5 percent of the population had been vaccinated by the end of 2021.[68] There were enough vaccines to go round, but the self-interested actions of high-income countries created artificial scarcity in low-income countries. Rich nations bought far more vaccines than they actually needed; one study estimates that by the end of 2021 they had stockpiled 1.2 billion doses, despite having vaccinated their populations already.[69] That is more than enough to vaccinate all adults in sub-Saharan Africa twice. In addition, several high-income countries, including the UK and Germany, repeatedly blocked proposals to waive the intellectual property rights for Covid-19 vaccines. This would have suspended patents related to the vaccines and allowed anyone to produce them—not just big pharmaceutical companies whose supplies were almost exclusively going to people in rich nations. It is as if no one has learned from the deaths of more than 10 million people in low-income countries from HIV-AIDS in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when pharmaceutical companies supported by wealthy nations blocked production of generic ARVs.