In an op-ed today in the Guardian, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown exposed what he called the European Union’s “neo-colonial approach” to the supply of COVID-19 vaccines particularly to Africa. Under the headline, “The World Is Making Billions of Covid Vaccine Doses, So Why Is Africa Not Getting Them?” he wrote: “I have learned from African leaders that, this month and next, about 10 million single-shot Johnson & Johnson (J&J) vaccines filled and finished at the Aspen factory in South Africa will be exported to Europe, at the very time that Africa is grappling with its deadliest wave of Covid-19 infections yet.”
“Compared to the swift development of the path-breaking Covid vaccines, getting shots into all the world’s arms should be straightforward. But vaccine nationalism – and Europe’s neocolonial approach to global health – is dividing the world into rich and protected people, who live, and those who are poor, unprotected and at risk of dying,” Brown wrote. Because of this, he said, 45 out of 54 African countries would miss their September target of vaccinating 10% of their citizens. Brown called for rich countries to provide £50 billion in financial support, waive patents to allow African countries to manufacture their own drugs, and run down stockpiles of vaccines that were not needed. African nations require vaccines immediately, and rich countries would not be safe until there was mass vaccination for every country, he said.
