The World Health Organization’s (WHO) declaration of a global emergency over the new Mpox outbreak gives wealthy nations a chance to remove the lingering stain of their inhumanity when many hoarded vaccines during the Covid-19 pandemic. That shameful episode remains a source of pain, resentment and distrust. Wealthy nations can assuage that anger in Africa and the developing world by acting swiftly to partner with continental institutions to halt the spread of Mpox.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, rich governments spoke loftily of a common humanity and global solidarity to fight the virus. When vaccines for the virus became available, the selfishness and inhumanity of many of these governments was laid bare. Rich nations served themselves first, stockpiled the drugs even when they no longer urgently needed them, priced them out of many poor countries’ ability to purchase, and held on to them until they expired even when there was ample opportunity to sell or donate them to the many who desperately needed them in the developing world.
The scientific journal Nature reported in November 2022 that, according to mathematical models incorporating data from 152 countries, at least 1.3-million lives might have been saved if vaccines had been shared more equitably with lower-income countries in 2021.
In Africa and other parts of the world, the hypocrisy of rich nations unleashed huge resentments that have played no small part in geopolitical shifts that have led to warmer relations and deeper links with Russia and China at the expense of the US and other western countries. President Cyril Ramaphosa, who led the AU at the height of the pandemic, told the Global Financing Pact summit in Paris in June 2023 that “we felt like we were beggars when it came to vaccine availability”.
“Let me tell you, [that was] something that generated a lot of resentment. We resented that, and it got worse when we said we want to manufacture our own vaccines. And when we went to the World Trade Organization, there was a lot of resistance, enormous resistance,” he said.
Billionaire Zimbabwean entrepreneur and Econet Global founder Strive Masiyiwa, tasked with buying vaccines for Africa, told a Milken Institute conference in 2021 that the system was essentially rigged against poor nations. “This was a deliberate global architecture of unfairness.”
How will the global response to Mpox differ from the response to Covid-19? So far, rich nations have largely stood back and watched. The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (Africa CDC) says it needs 10-million vaccine doses to control the outbreak. It only has 200,000 and says that “global solidarity is essential”.
Many are sceptical that such solidarity will materialise. A South African vaccine access activist told me that the battles over Covid-19 vaccine equitable distribution showed that only when westerners are significantly affected by Mpox “will you begin to see real action — and not for Africa”.
It should not be so. With the Covid-19 pandemic the world showed that it has the ingenuity and the resources to move swiftly and in tandem to fight a relentless foe. At the final hurdle, what the rich nations lacked was humanity. Theirs was moral failure on a global scale.
The fact that the US announced last Wednesday that it would donate 50,000 doses to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help with the fast-spreading outbreak is a start, but a lot more needs to be done. Ongoing talks with Japan and the US for more shots need to be ramped up and to be copied by other wealthy nations.
We know now that it is a short hop from outbreak to pandemic if the world does nothing. If the world retreats into its fortresses and narrow nationalist thinking, as it did in 2021, the consequences may be far worse than they were three years ago.
This moment presents a challenge for business as well. It is a challenge for investors in the pharmaceutical and related industries to ask how sustainable their profit-taking is. It shouldn’t be ‘business as usual’. Many entrepreneurs and businesspeople got into whatever industry they are in to make a difference. This is the time to make that difference.
Rich countries and their leaders should also consider their own citizens’ survival. When the highly transmissible “Omicron” variant was identified in South Africa in late 2021, leading to further travel bans and border closures, there were a staggering 12-billion vaccines already in production in the world. Every human being — all 8-billion — could have received at least one jab. They didn’t, leading to millions of hoarded vaccines across the world being destroyed as they reached their expiry dates. Meanwhile, the virus mutated and continued to take lives. How could humanity fail so spectacularly?
We know now that it is a short hop from outbreak to pandemic if the world does nothing. If the world retreats into its fortresses and narrow nationalist thinking, as it did in 2021, the consequences may be far worse than they were three years ago. The virus may continue to mutate, as it already has. The world may face shutdowns, instability and economic penury.
And the people of the rich nations will have to face the monster in the mirror.
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