WRITING: INTERNATIONAL POLITICS - Vaccine is a human Right

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    The biggest human security threat to the US is the lack of vaccines availability in the world. When we think about USA owning 50% of all vaccines available and still ordering another 100 million as safety net. It really questions our human principals. ” The federal government has now bought enough coronavirus vaccines to fully immunize 750 million people. That is three times the number of American adults”   ( Winfield Cunningham, 2021). Do we really need to pill up on vaccines? Would it be more efficient to share vaccines with the rest of the world? After all, are not we living in an interconnected world and either we heal together, or we perish together?

    Our modern world is interdependent, and cooperation is inevitable to reach common solutions. The risk of vaccinating the rich and deliberately living the poor unvaccinated may cause more harm than good. If the world is not fully vaccinated sooner. More variants may appear, and our current vaccines may become obsolete. Are we going to create a vaccine for every variant? Probably not. It is not viable from a financial standpoint neither from a human physiological one. The public already feel a fatigue and do not want to hear any more about this deadly epidemy. Some among us refuse the idea of getting vaccinated. Therefore, we can imagine people’s reaction if we have to be vaccinated every 6 months or so. Our best hope is to stick together as a world leaving in the same planet. Why should not we temporary suspend the vaccine patents to speed up the vaccination process? The World Health organization is in favor to temporary suspend vaccines patents. “Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus supports a patent waiver that would allow countries to make and sell cheap copies of vaccines that were invented elsewhere” (Boseley, 2021). I do understand the opposition of drug companies and their need to make legitimate profit. Yet, if the economy of the world is decimated. No country would be able to pay for expensive vaccines. We should take extraordinary decision and consider covid vaccination as a matter of life or death. Special circumstance should be used as it was used during HIV spread over the world. Generic medicines were used to offset the cost of expensive medication (Berger, 2021).

    Covid-19 already impacted the life of Americans either positively or negatively. Unfortunately, the 1% got richer and poor get poorer. “A report by Swiss bank UBS found that billionaires increased their wealth by more than a quarter (27.5%) at the height of the crisis from April to July, just as millions of people around the world lost their jobs or were struggling to get by on government schemes” (Neate, 2020). The number of unemployed Americans is unheard of. The spread of poverty, homelessness, isolation, and health issues are impacting all of us. Ethnic minorities and women will bear the biggest burden. Many women left the job market to take care of their families. According to Christine Ro: “One of the unique aspects of the current covid-19 recession is the way it’s impacting women. Hospitality and retail employ many women and are also vulnerable to lockdown measures. Some effects are already visible. Globally, women’s job losses due to Covid-19 are 1.8 times greater than men’s”. Will these women get their jobs back ?

    It is hard for me to be either optimist or pessimist since it is a changing trait of character. My life changed after the pandemic. I used to manage a 2000 rooms Disney Resort and was furloughed. I decided to do what I can to limit the impact of covid-19 pandemic on my work and home family. When I started hearing about Florida Unemployment debacle web site. I contacted my 150 team members and ask them about their financial situation. I gave thousands of dollars to the ones not able to collect unemployment. I also promise them to not ask for the money back till they get their job back with Disney. I decided to reconvert into Biotechnology field and started working at Orlando Health Clinical Laboratory. The conversion was not easy. Nevertheless, I had to make this hard decision. I am a realist by nature and prefer to change things I can control and adjust to life challenges.

    Finally, I hope that the world will learn a lesson from the Covid-19 pandemic. It is hard to be optimist when we see the current event. However, being liberal, realist or constructivist should not stop us from being human first.

 

References

 

"MLA Formatting and Style Guide." The Purdue OWL Purdue U Writing Lab. Accessed 18 Feb. 2021.

 

Paige Winfield Cunningham. The U.S. bought enough coronavirus vaccines for three times its adult population, March 11, 2021, The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/03/11/health-202-us-bought-enough-coronavirus-vaccines-four-times-its-adult-population/Accessed 7 April.2021.

 

John Miller. Activists, drug groups in waiver war over COVID-19 shot patents, March 10, 2021, Reuters.https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-wto-vaccines-expla-idUSKBN2B2285. Accessed 8 April.2021.

 

Sarah Boseley, WHO chief: waive Covid vaccine patents to put world on 'war footing', March 5,2021, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/05/covid-vaccines-who-chief-backs-patent-waiver-to-boost-production. Accessed 8 April.2021.

 

Rupert Neate, Billionaires' wealth rises to $10.2 trillion amid Covid crisis, October 6,2020, The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/07/covid-19-crisis-boosts-the-fortunes-of-worlds-billionaires Accessed 9 April.2021.

Cristine Ro, why this recession disproportionately affects women, October 26, 2020, BBC. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20201021-why-this-recession-disproportionately-affects-women. Accessed 9 April.2021.

 

 

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