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My Take
Opinion
Alex Lo
Alex Lo

My Take | Rich countries partly responsible for Indian health crisis

  • With the pandemic just getting started in many poorer nations, the wealthy should purely out of self-interest not stockpile vaccines and use all resources to fight Covid-19 wherever it spreads

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Patients breathe with the help of oxygen provided at a Sikh temple in Ghaziabad, India. Photo: AFP
Alex Lo
The horrific health crisis in India is surely the responsibility of the country’s health authorities and government. But rich nations should not just send token aid and then pretend they are not at least partly responsible. They have been hoarding life-saving Covid-19 vaccines on a massive scale, and the most powerful countries still refuse to waive or loosen vaccine-making patents for poor nations to launch their own production.
This is despite India and South Africa having tried for months, with the support of dozens of low- and middle-income countries, to appeal to the World Trade Organization for a temporary patent waiver. India, let us remember, is a world-leading producer of generic drugs, and would have the capacity to produce its own Covid-19 vaccines if patent holders and their governments let it.
The United States, the European Union, Britain, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Norway and Australia have all been dithering on the “Trips waiver” put forward by India and South Africa last year. Such waivers are allowed under the “Trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights” (Trips) of the WTO.
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By now, about one in four people have received their jab in high-income countries. By contrast, according to the World Health Organization, only one in 500 in low-income countries have been inoculated against Covid-19. Some have argued it’s the responsibility of any national government to protect its own citizens first. That’s fair enough. But some countries such as Canada and the US have stockpiled doses that are several times their entire population. It would make more sense for international scientific authorities to determine how many doses a well-stocked country needs to cover its population and release the surpluses.

This is not just altruistic. Hoarding can be self-defeating in a global pandemic. Uncontrolled spread in the developing countries may end up sending variants of the deadly virus back to rich countries.

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