West's vaccine hoarding harms poor countries

Human rights talk hypocritical from those who 'forgot about humanitarianism and sharing'

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

While the COVID-19 pandemic requires international cooperation in providing vaccines and medical assistance for poor countries, Western states, which 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," Shiha said.

Western powers use human rights issues to exercise political pressure and interfere in other countries' domestic affairs to achieve their own interests, while "poor countries fall prey to this exploitation", he said.

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

"Hoarding these vaccines is dangerous. It means people outside the US－including front-line 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," Teicher said.

Months of COVID-19 vaccine hoarding in the US has also resulted in waste of large quantities of vaccines due to reduced domestic demand. 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 been against COVID-19 vaccine hoarding, which exacerbates an inequality of access to the vaccine. In the US, 50 percent of the population has been fully vaccinated, Reuters reported on Friday, while less than 2 percent of Africans are fully vaccinated, according to the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

The WHO appealed on Wednesday to wealthy countries to delay giving COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to their largely protected populations so people in poorer countries will have a chance to get vaccinated, but the US quickly rejected the proposal.

Sarah Joseph, a professor of human rights law at Griffith University, Brisbane, in Australia, said hoarding vaccines breaches human rights in other countries by depriving them of availability to the 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," she said.

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

"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," she said in a paper posted online in June.

In addition to the US, countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada and some European Union members have been hoarding vaccines, resulting in the short supply of COVID-19 vaccines in many developing countries, according to Kislaya Prasad, academic director for the Center for Global Business at the University of Maryland.

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.

Despite great demand for COVID-19 vaccines domestically, China has been providing the vaccine to countries in need since September last year.

China has donated, and is donating COVID-19 vaccines to more than 100 countries, and meanwhile exporting COVID-19 vaccines to more than 60 countries, with a total supply of more than 770 million doses, ranking tops worldwide, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said.

Xinhua contributed to this story.