Jab hoarding exposes hypocrisy

People queue up to get themselves inoculated with the Sinopharm Covid-19 coronavirus vaccine during a mass vaccination camp at Kholamora in Keraniganj district on Aug 7, 2021.
(MUNIR UZ ZAMAN / AFP)

Hoarding of COVID-19 vaccines by the United States and some other Western countries has exposed the hypocrisy behind human rights standards they devised to serve their own interests, rights experts said.

While the pandemic requires international cooperation on providing vaccines and medical assistance for poor countries, Western states that boast about human rights have not fulfilled their responsibilities, said Essam Shiha, president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.

"When the crisis took place, those Western countries cared only about themselves and forgot about the idea of humanitarianism and the idea of sharing," he said.

Western powers use human rights issues to exert political pressure on other countries and interfere in their domestic affairs to achieve their own interests, said Shiha, adding that "poor countries fall prey to this exploitation".

The attitudes in the West contrast sharply with a pledge by Chinese President Xi Jinping last week that China will provide 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines to the world this year.

Carrie Teicher, director of programs at Doctors Without Borders, said the US has secured enough COVID-19 vaccines to vaccinate its entire population, with more than half a billion surplus doses. But health workers in many poor countries still are not vaccinated and have to work at high risk to themselves.

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Hoarding these vaccines is dangerous. It means people outside the US … will die or be left unprotected from this virus simply because of where they happen to live.

Carrie Teicher, director of programs at Doctors Without Borders

"Hoarding these vaccines is dangerous. It means people outside the US-including frontline health workers who risk their lives each and every day to save others-will die or be left unprotected from this virus simply because of where they happen to live," said Teicher.

Months of hoarding in the US has also resulted in large quantities of vaccines going to waste. Doses to vaccinate at least 13 million people are in danger of expiring in the US, The Washington Post reported on July 27.

International organizations, including the World Health Organization, have spoken out against vaccine hoarding, which exacerbates inequality of access to the vaccines.

Huge gap

In the US, 70 percent of adults have received at least a dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, while less than 2 percent of Africans are fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The WHO on Wednesday appealed to rich countries to delay plans to give out booster shots of vaccines to their largely protected populations in order to let people in poorer countries have a chance to get a shot. But the US was quick to reject the proposal.

Sarah Joseph, a professor of human rights law at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, said that the hoarding of vaccines breaches the human rights of people in other countries by depriving them of a scarce commodity.

"All states have human rights obligations, both to the people of other states and to their own people, to do what they reasonably can to increase global supply," Joseph said in a paper posted online in June.

"The hoarding of scarce vaccines after the vaccination of one's population would constitute a breach of a duty to share in a vital scarce resource that can enhance enjoyment of the rights to health and life in other countries.

"The rights of a state's own people are also harmed if a state hoards vaccines, thus helping to delay the end of the pandemic, while vaccine scarcity prevails."

Kislaya Prasad, academic director for the Center for Global Business at the University of Maryland, said that in addition to the US, countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and some European Union members have been hoarding vaccines to an extent that left shortages in many developing countries.

While the US has been inwardly focused, other countries such as China, India, and Russia have made donations and sales to a number of countries. In China's case, vaccines have been delivered to countries in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, Prasad said.

The announcement for the supply of 2 billion vaccine doses to the world, made by President Xi on Thursday, comes as the latest Chinese initiative to honor a commitment to make the vaccine a global public good. In addition, China will also donate $100 million to the COVAX global vaccine initiative for the distribution of the vaccine to developing countries.

Despite great demand for the vaccines domestically, China has been providing the vaccine to countries in need since last year.

China is donating and has donated COVID-19 vaccines to more than 100 countries, and has provided more than 60 countries with the vaccines under export arrangements. All up, the country has supplied more than 770 million doses, the Foreign Ministry said of the world-leading effort.

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Xinhua contributed to this story.

Contact the writer at wangxiaodong@chinadaily.com.cn