In January, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director-general said vaccine hoarding by rich countries would be a “catastrophic moral failure” that would keep “the pandemic burning”. Michael Ryan, executive director of the WHO, said that by stockpiling vaccines affluent nations were putting developing countries at huge risk.
At present, the UK has ordered 457 million doses of the vaccine, 3.6 times the population of the country. Canada has ordered 338 million doses, enough to vaccinate their population five times over. The African Union, a union of 55 African states, has ordered just 672 million doses, covering only 38% of the entire population.
Israel is a world leader in terms of percentage of population vaccinated. They have administered at least one dose to just over fifty per cent of their nine million citizens. In many ways, the Israel case study is a positive one, their COVID-19 cases have rapidly declined as they have administered doses of the vaccine and while the world watches we realise that maybe, eventually, there as an end in sight and soon things might return to normal.
But there is a darker side to this story too.
Israel occupies Palestine, a state of just over 5.2 million people. In Gaza, where roughly 2.7 million Palestinians live, Medicins Sans Frontieres have made a “generous estimate” that at most 35,000 vaccines are available. Israel, with their excess of vaccines, is just a few kilometres away.
“Israel is an occupying power and has millions of vaccines. Palestine is the occupied territory and has barely a few thousand.” – Matthias Kennes, MSF Medical Adviser Palestine
So far, Israel has sent 2,000 doses to the Palestinian Authority, claiming that Palestine is not their responsibility and they should deal with the issue themselves. But the truth is that, although Palestine do have self-control, this control is extremely limited.
And as vaccines continue to be administered in Israel, COVID-19 cases increase in Palestine. Cases in occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza have now reached over 203,000. And earlier this week, as Palestinians reach the height of their suffering, Israel did not only continue to withhold vaccines from Palestine, but also started to send out vaccines all over the world.
On the 25th of February Honduras received its first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines from Israel. They also planned to send vaccines to Guatemala, Hungary and the Czech Republic. They were calling it “vaccine diplomacy”.
And then, as Israel came under pressure, they froze the programme to ship vaccines abroad. But just as they stopped, claims came out that China, Russia and India were using vaccines to gain political favours from smaller, less affluent countries too.
If the pandemic has taught us one thing it is that we, as humans, depend on each other. Two things can be true at the same time: countries should not hoard vaccines and vaccines should not be used as political blackmail. We should vaccinate those that are most vulnerable in all countries and work backwards, because until we are all protected, normal doesn’t exist.
— Jonathan Lewis (@lonnyjewis)