Jasmin Schmitz, Research Assistant to the Managing Director at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research is interested in current challenges to global health governance as posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and in particular in how vaccine nationalism became a dominant mode of governance since the outbreak in early 2020. She just wrote a Blog Post in the Governance Accross Borders blog. We provide you the first paragraph here and recommend a click to the full original text.
When the then novel Covid-19-virus broke out in December 2019, it soon spread globally posing a challenge to health governance all across the globe. Internal containment measures were put in place to domestically stop the virus through lockdown or social distancing; internationally borders were closed, and travel restrictions were put in place to stop the ongoing spread at the borders. When first news broke that vaccine-trials were showing promising results, this seemed like the salvation from ever increasing new infections. Already during the first wave of Covid outbreaks trends of nation-focused policies could be observed. While there are certainly cases of cross-border cooperation, they tend to remain the exception. The WHO tried to install a global distribution mechanism through COVAX yet the initiative did not succeed in gaining global influence; Vaccine nationalism became is predominant mode of governance. The access to the shot has become highly dependent on where one lives. The inequality in access to vaccines has sparked discussion surrounding intellectual property as well as the involvement of public financing in the developmental stage of the pharmaceutical. So, more than half a year since the roll-out of the immunization campaign started, it is time to take a look at the distribution of vaccines globally and why they should not be viewed as the sole solution to the pandemic.[Continue]
