VACCINE THE NEW BIO WEAPON

Here’s a story. Two men have been walking for days in search of food and water after surviving a plane crash in a desert.

- Ameen Izzadeen

The stronger of the two walks in front and comes across an oasis where he finds edible plants and water to drink. He fills his stomach and quenches his thirst. The weaker man who reaches the oasis a day later and asks his friend to share the food with him. But the stronger man, thinking that he will have to survive on this diet for days and weeks until a search party finds him, refuses to share the plant and chases his companion away.

To look at it from a more humane point of view, we are not humans if we fill our stomachs with the best of foods and hoard the surplus, while we watch the poor die of hunger. Similarly, in a pandemic situation, it is not humane, if the rich and powerful who gain access to a vaccine first, inoculate their populations first and hoard the vaccine, thus denying its early availability to the poor nations.

In our competitive world, most nations are jostling to become militarily and economically stronger and make the rivals weaker so that they could live in security, have a big voice in setting the world agenda and be better prepared to face challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The bottom line is that every nation is in pursuit of power. Security studies say that in a two-state model, to the extent one nation increases its security, to that extent the other nation’s security declines. Early access to vaccine certainly increases a nation’s ability to revive its economy well ahead of the nations which have not yet received the vaccine. If the vaccine is not shared among all nations equally and if it is used for power political gains, then the nations in pursuit of narrow-minded nationalistic agenda are no different from the wicked man in our story and are, in a sense, bio terrorists.