The Summit for Vaccine Internationalism offers a space for governments of developing countries to broker their own multilateral solutions. Richer countries have largely failed them.
A week after the G7 patted itself on the back for agreeing charitably to hand out 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines (“a drop in the ocean,” as Amnesty International put it <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/06/g7-pledge-to-share-one-billion-vaccine-doses-with-poorer-countries-is-a-drop-in-the-ocean/>), a very different group of leaders will convene virtually on Friday to hash out a more durable way to bring the pandemic to an end. As the climate crisis accelerates, the meeting may also preview an alternative to the G7’s underwhelming climate dithering <https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/g7-leaders-commit-increasing-climate-finance-contributions-2021-06-12/> in Cornwall last week. Only 6.2 percent of the world has been fully vaccinated, with just 0.3 of shots having gone to low-income countries. Eight-five percent have gone to upper-middle- and high-income countries like the United States, which has 13.1 percent <https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/covid-vaccine-tracker-global-distribution/> of the world’s vaccines and just 4.3 percent of its population. The continuing crisis of international vaccine rollout is disturbing not just in its own right but for how it suggests the climate crisis will be handled. There are plenty of overlaps between the two challenges: The countries being worst hit by Covid-19 also tend to be worst hit by climate-fueled storms, droughts, and heatwaves. The violently unequal rollout brings other lessons, too. The White House has also been keen to frame climate action as a profitable opportunity for U.S. companies to hoard valuable green intellectual property and outcompete the administration’s geopolitical rivals. As Biden told <https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/us/politics/joe-biden-speech-transcript.html> a joint session of Congress, “We have to develop and dominate the products and technologies of the future: advanced batteries, biotechnology, computer chips, clean energy,” in order for the U.S. to “win the twenty-first century.” Making those critical technologies subject to the kind of retrograde intellectual property protections now constraining vaccines will allow corporations to charge exorbitant rents for the right to decarbonize. That not only poses barriers to deploying clean energy but could make cheap new coal plants—likely to keep running for decades—a more attractive option for countries where millions still lack electricity. No country will “win the twenty-first century” so long as investors and executives can choke off paths to low-carbon development. https://newrepublic.com/article/162787/unequal-distribution-covid-vaccines-preview-coming-climate-apartheid -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#9314): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/9314 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/83652932/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
