Vaccine nationalism will harm everyone

AstraZeneca's supply of COVID-19 vaccines to the European Union will decrease by 60 percent in the first quarter of this year owing to problems at its Belgium factory, the pharmaceutical company said in a recent statement. That means the EU can only get about 32 million doses of the vaccine from the company.

The statement has prompted the EU and the United Kingdom to scramble for vaccines over the past week. The EU said that according to a deal it has with AstraZeneca, the British pharmaceutical company is obliged to provide the 27-country block the vaccines it produces at its factories in the UK. However, the company said that it had inked the supply deal with the UK government before it did so with the EU, and it has no choice but to meet the UK's demands first.

As of now, 4.2 percent of the EU's population has been vaccinated against the novel coronavirus, compared with 13 percent of the UK's population.

World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus pointed out that vaccine nationalism will harm everyone, saying that poor cooperation between nations comes in the way of containing the pandemic.

"Despite the growing number of vaccine options, current manufacturing capacity meets only a fraction of global needs," the WHO director-general told Foreign Policy magazine. "Allowing the majority of the world's population to go unvaccinated will not only perpetuate needless illness and deaths and the pain of ongoing lockdowns, but also spawn new virus mutations as COVID-19 continues to spread among unprotected populations."

Moderna, a major US COVID-19 vaccine producer, also said it is cutting back on vaccine deliveries. The tensions surrounding supply of the COVID-19 vaccine have exposed its shortage as a public good.

While increasing manufacturing capacity, the international community must strengthen negotiations on fair allocation of vaccines. The WHO, particularly, should not ignore the developing and least-developed countries' demand for the vaccines, because no country is safe until the virus is eliminated from all countries.

Against this backdrop, China has set a good example of being a responsible country by supplying a large number of doses of the COVID-19 vaccines to the developing world. Those sarcastically calling it China's "vaccine diplomacy" need serious introspection.