No nation an island with Covid

Scott Morrison set an example for leaders everywhere when he warned last Friday against the dangers of increasing “vaccine nationalism” in the global battle to defeat COVID-19. “There’s never been a global effort like this,” the Prime Minister said, pledging that if Australian researchers were successful in finding a vaccine, their success would be shared with the rest of the world.

With 120 vaccine research projects under way internationally, involving 1000 clinical trials, he argued that “any country that were to find this vaccine and not make it available around the world without restraint, I think, would be judged terribly by history”.

He was right. Moves by the US, the European Union and Britain to go it alone in striking deals with major global drug manufacturers to corner the market and secure many millions of doses of whatever vaccine emerges may be understandable. There can also be little surprise that the US, China and Russia have shunned the multinational COVAX initiative formed under the auspices of the World Health Organisation to ensure equitable access by all countries to a vaccine.

But their attitudes raise concerns about what Medecins Sans Frontieres has termed “a dangerous trend of vaccine nationalism” that could potentially see a replay of the 2009-10 H1N1 flu virus. During epidemics of that much milder disease, rich nations bought up most of the available vaccine supplies, leaving much of the world with none. As former head of the US Agency for International Development Gayle Smith says, there is a risk that some countries are doing “exactly what we feared — which is every man for himself’’.

For as long as the deadly pandemic continues to rage in any country, no other country will be safe. It is overwhelmingly in the interests of every nation to co-operate to defeat COVID-19, and any future pandemics.