Ensuring Vaccine Equity, Erasing Vaccine Nationalism: Upholding the Human Rights and Justice Framework

Abstract

COVID-19 has shown that today the world is more interconnected, yet it is more hierarchical and stratified riddled with disproportionate systemic structural socio-economic inequalities. The global humanitarian disaster has highlighted the despaired state of human rights affairs across the planet. It has exposed the supremacy of the neoliberal, nationalist paradigm that is deeply entrenched affecting the poorest of the poor. The pandemic has also indicated how capitalism is eroding democratic values endangering the lives of billions. Today, the high-income countries and the pharmaceutical companies are advancing their strategic interest, whereas the persons in the middle and low-income countries are being deprived of their basic requirements. Inequities in vaccine distribution are obstructing the effective response to the pandemic at the global level. Discrimination in access to the vaccine is adversely affecting the marginalized. This essay argues for respecting human rights as global health justice and suggests affordable, accessible, and quality vaccination and treatment for all in line with reasoning that health inequalities and cross border issues are morally and ethically troubling and therefore are morally justified. Based on positive duties to create conditions for the availability of health rights for all humans, it argues that no rich country or resourceful persons will be safe until the last person is safe. These moral duties, in turn, generate duties of cooperation and obligations at international and domestic levels to better align with the principles of global health governance. Leaving a large section of the population in the Third world behind is not going to eliminate the threats of the spread of the epidemic.

Keywords: vaccine equity, COVID-19, third world, rich countries, global health, human rights