When the G20 met in Rome on 30-31 October, World Health Organisation director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus got a slot to speak.
“Low-income countries, most of them in Africa, have received just 0.4% of [Covid] vaccines; more than 80% have gone to G20 countries.
“We understand and support every government’s responsibility to protect its own people. But vaccine equity is not charity; it’s in every country’s best interests.
“82 countries are at risk of missing the target [of 40% vax by end-2021]. For most, the barrier is not absorptive capacity, it’s insufficient supply...
“We ask you to support local vaccine production in Africa. We call on those countries that have promised to donate vaccines to make good on those promises, as urgently as possible”.
But, as the political leaders gather in Glasgow for COP26, they’re not talking about that call.
Yes, climate change is a bigger health risk than Covid. Yes, Africa’s count of cases and deaths is currently falling. Yes, the big Covid spikes now are in Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, driven more by resentment of public authorities limiting jabs than by lack of vaccine.
But it is urgent now to vaccinate poorer countries to prepare for months and years to come. Much of Africa is in the Southern Hemisphere. The virus seems to have seasonal patterns. Africa has previously had spikes in July 2020 and July 2021, when it was winter in the South.
Jabs in Africa are still jogging along at 0.1 per 100 per day, and worldwide at 0.4 per 100 per day.
Socialists add to the WHO’s request our demand to requisition Big Pharma: to lift patent protection, to extend production, and to distribute vaccines and other tools against Covid (like the new anti-Covid pill, which looks to be useful in the first few days of infections) at cost-price.
In Britain, the calls for “Plan B” type mild Covid curbs have abated with levelling-off or possible fall of Covid counts since 21 October, after the steady rise from mid-Sep until 21 Oct. The argument is still strong. New Covid-count increases may come as winter makes for more indoors crowding. Britain’s Covid deaths and hospital admissions (though, thanks to vax, much lower than early-2021) are from 2.5 to five times higher, depending on count and country, than most other West European countries, most of which still have some mild Covid curbs.
Britain has twice as much testing as France or Italy, ten times more than some other west European countries with lower Covid rates.
Testing is necessary to identify Covid cases and see how the pandemic is developing. Regular quick-result lateral flow tests may help in workplaces even though they have a lot of “false negatives”.
But the 27 October parliamentary Public Accounts Committee report indicates that England’s Test and Trace is working more as a cash funnel to thousands of consultants paid £1,000-plus a day and to profiteers. It is called NHS Test and Trace, but it is run by private contractors, who (despite some government promises following campaigning by Safe and Equal and by Emily Thornberry MP) often do not even offer proper isolation pay to their workers.
Some 700 million tests have been issued. Results have been recorded for only 14% of them. The lab capacity is heavily underused. And still over 60% of those with Covid-like symptoms fail to get a test.
International experience suggests that the biggest factor in limiting Covid tolls longer-run is relative social equality and social provision: isolation pay, uncrowded housing; requisitioning of resources for public health, public health-care, and social-care provision; workers’ control of workplace safety.
