Again the Quebec magazine L’actualitê has an interesting feature article in its April edition dealing with COVID-19 and translated it means what are the steps we can take to ensure we don’t have a year like 2020?
The fifth step is to ensure the entire planet is vaccinated.
Tedros Ghebreyesus the Director General of the World Health Organization called it a moral catastrophe that as of January 15th 93% of the vaccines produced so far were purchased by wealthy countries Canada amongst them.
This vaccine nationalism is risky because the more the virus circulates amongst the world the more susceptible it will be to mutations which could complicate the vaccine process including in the wealthy countries. For example Canadian citizens could visit the Caribbean in 2022 and possibly come into contact with a mutation that can resist the vaccine of those Canadians.
A group of the wealthy countries have created COVAX that will distribute 2 billion doses of vaccine to countries that do not have the means to vaccinate their entire populations. Canada has contributed 865 million dollars. In terms of Big Pharma only the manufacturers of the AstraZeneca have agreed to supply to COVAX at cost price until July 2021.
Mira Johri a professor of The School of Public Health at the University of Montreal thinks that states should unify and impose on pharmaceutical companies a guarantee they will make only a reasonable profit from their vaccines which would be justified by the massive amounts of public funds that financed vaccine research.
There should be a push to make the vaccines generic as soon as possible. Denise Byrnes director general of Oxfam Quebec noted that we have seen that in South Africa the use of generic drugs completely transformed the AIDS epidemic.