Who to believe over COVID vaccines: Biden or Merkel?

Amy Aves Challenger, The Independent

In the small waiting room of my Zurich doctor, birds sang through a curtained window after I finally got my first jab of the Moderna vaccine. My vaccine likely was made in Moderna’s facility in Basel. Yet it wasn’t available to me until this week because the US wasn’t exporting many vaccines. Again and again throughout the pandemic, vaccines have been made in European labs, shipped to the US for bottling, and then refused re-importation to European countries which are now in more need than America.

Because of my autoimmune condition, I was placed in “Group B”, which made it possible for me to get my jab this week before most of my friends of the same age who will wait till summer. This did not make me joyful. As I was observed for side effects, I felt surprising symptoms — grief, gratitude, and guilt. As an American living in Europe, the international “vaccine wars” have taken a heavy toll on me. Since my jab, Joe Biden and Angela Merkel have become increasingly opposed on this issue.

I hoped the US would support a lift of international patents like Biden recently announced. But the other side of the argument — such as that put forward by Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, president and CEO of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, in the wake of Biden’s announcement — muddied my mental waters. McMurry-Heath and her compatriots argued that lifting patents could sabotage future biotech investments and provide information that wouldn’t actually be useful to developing countries in the long run.

“Handing needy countries a recipe book without the ingredients, safeguards, and sizable workforce needed will not help people waiting for the vaccine. Handing them the blueprint to construct a kitchen that - in optimal conditions — can take a year to build will not help us stop the emergence of dangerous new Covid variants,” McMurry-Heath wrote in her statement. “The better alternative would have been to follow through on the President’s pledge just last week to make the United States the world’s ‘arsenal of vaccines’… And all of this [is foolish] while we have yet to fulfill our existing commitment to the international COVAX vaccine donation program.”

Like most — including the politicians in charge of some of the most powerful countries in the world — I’m conflicted. Terrible scenes are unfolding in India, and babies are dying in a human catastrophe in Brazil. Hospital beds, oxygen, ventilators and medications are in short supply. Many, like UN Aids, are warning of an impending “global vaccine apartheid” after we stem the tide of initial emergencies.

Rather than forcing a handful of corporations to lift international patents, why doesn’t the US ship excess vaccines or purchase them for countries in need like India and Brazil? Why don’t we get vaccines immediately to the ones who need them, as Merkel suggests? Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, recently noted how the US isn’t widely exporting vaccines while Europe is. And according to Merkel, lifting patents will have serious consequences on future vaccine production. At the end of the day, investors give money to science to make money. So how will the next vaccine, in the next pandemic, be funded if Biden’s only commitment to vaccinating the world is through patent waivers?

After my jab, I felt nauseated by the fact that 1 in 4 privileged Americans with access to a vaccine doesn’t even plan to use theirs. Maybe the folks pondering whether to get a vaccine could give twice as many jabs to the Go Give Campaign for others who stand in line, desperately wanting one.

“You need to sit there for fifteen minutes,” the nurse said. “So we can be sure you’re okay.”

I’m not okay, I thought. The hole in my arm feels more like a canyon, a hole in the earth that millions of people are falling through.