ON JANUARY 18 this year, head of the World Health Organisation Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus revealed that 25 — yes, just 25 doses — had been administered across all the poorest countries, compared with 39 million doses in wealthier ones. 

He said the world was on the edge of a “catastrophic moral failure.” 

Dr Tedros criticised pharmaceutical companies for prioritising vaccine approval in wealthier countries over submitting data to WHO to speed up the Covax programme. 

He noted: “These actions will only prolong the pandemic.”

Fast forward a month and Dr Ifeanyi Nsoror, a Nigerian and senior Atlantic fellow for health equity at George Washington University in the US, pointed out in an interview on February 22 that no-one in Nigeria, a country of 200 million people, had been vaccinated. 

Dr Nsoror also pointed out that some of the Nigerian elite, including the current vice-president, had flown to Dubai in the UAE for vaccination. 

The Covax programme delivered four million doses in early March and promises 16 million doses by the end of 2022. 

We in the UK had 30 per cent of our population vaccinated in the first two months of the pandemic. 

Nigeria and the neocolonial poor world are set to have vaccinated 20 per cent of their population in the first two years of the pandemic.

Poor countries who wish to increase the speed of their pitifully slow vaccine programme can try to negotiate with big pharma directly. 

South Africa is asked by AstraZeneca to pay £3.80 per dose, Uganda £5.07 per dose while the EU negotiated £1.56 per dose. 

Recall that the original intention of Oxford was to provide doses of the vaccine free of charge or at most at cost price of 7p per dose, patent-free. 

Oxford was pressured by the Gates Foundation, a major financial donor to its research, to sign an exclusive deal with pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. 

The results have been spectacularly good for AstraZeneca and spectacularly bad for the world’s population. 

Shares in AstraZeneca are soaring and its CEO, Pascal Soriot, has seen his personal stock and options increase by $15 million since last April. 

Profits are rolling in. In an article of February 11 2021 in financial website of the year This is Money, it was reported that “Pascal Soriot hails Covid vaccine as profits soar.” 

The article quoted AstraZeneca as saying that revenues had grown and profits jumped from £1 billion to nearly £3bn by the end of 2020. 

In reality, AstraZeneca’s claims to produce and sell “at cost” are completely false and an attempt to gain a larger market share at the expense of their equally ruthless rivals. 

As the Financial Times reported in October 2020, the company is able to declare the pandemic “over” by July this year and charge any price it wants. 

Not that it has been inhibited from doing so already. The business magazine Fortune has commented on the “almost complete lack of transparency” in AstraZeneca’s pricing policy. 

If Oxford’s original intention, to produce the vaccine “open platform” and patent-free, to enable the vaccine to be produced around the world, one can only imagine how much better off the whole of humanity would be today. 

Instead we have “vaccine nationalism,” a huge vaccination imbalance between former colonial powers and their ex-colonies which mirrors wealth inequalities and the continuing danger to millions of lives — even including the nations of Britain. 

For to allow the virus to spread and fester in vast reservoirs in the “global South” is an ideal condition for the virus to mutate dangerously even more.

Rather than looking at real disaster in countries like Nigeria and potential disaster for us all, every country in the world could be approaching the kind of levels of vaccination which we have in Britain.

Winnie Byanyima, a UN undersecretary-general, commented on the barrier to being in a much better place “The current system enables pharmaceutical corporations to use government funding for research … but maintain monopoly on medicines … to boost profits.”

South Africa, supported by the Indian government, recently made a proposal at the WTO for the waiving of property rights for the vaccines until there is global immunity. 

The United Nations, the World Health Organisation and progressive opinion around the world supports such an approach. 

When will governments in the UK, including in Scotland, join this call?

Clearly no country can be safe until all countries are safe. To turn a callous blind eye to the spread of the virus in countries who have had slavery, colonialism and who suffer under neocolonialism and super-exploitation today would be a betrayal of the human race. 

Oxfam said recently: “We need open-source vaccines, mass produced … including crucially those in developing countries.”

Nick Dearden of Global Justice now said: “We urgently need technology and patents placed in public hands, so we can share this knowledge, and produce more vaccines now. Our ability to defeat this virus fairly and effectively depends upon it.”

Famously, Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine in the 1950s, refused to patent it. 

When asked who owned the vaccine he said: “The people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” 

Polio was eliminated.

Contrast Salk’s attitude with that of Pfizer, whichis busy leaning on South American governments to put up state resources as “collateral” for supplying the vaccine. 

Or the Gates Foundation which was instrumental in pressuring Oxford to “team up” with AstraZeneca. Or AstraZeneca itself.

All the governments of the UK, including the Scottish government, should call for vaccine production to be made patent-free worldwide. 

We should join other governments and international organisations in calling for an end to this disgrace, put humanity before greed and people before profit.

John Swinburne is the mover of a successful motion at the Educational Institute of Scotland national council meeting of March 5 calling for the Scottish government to join calls for patent-free coronavirus vaccine production worldwide.