Will A COVID-19 Vaccine Reach Developing Countries In Time?
By: Mai Mislang
Tags: Health, Vaccines, Coronavirus, Life, Public Health

In my country, it is the only way to safely emerge from quarantine.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

I just surpassed the eleventh week of our lockdown here in Manila with barely a scratch, and I celebrate it. I am fed, healthy, and still in high spirits despite losing so much, like many others. I am able to look after my aging parents and do the household errands on their behalf. I am not a burden to our creaky public health system. I am happily complying with the lockdown orders.

That may seem like a heavy cross to bear, but in a developing nation, my situation would stand out as the height of good fortune. Just outside of our gated sanctuary are clusters of shanty homes built with scraps of old plywood and corrugated steel. The residents of these urban poor communities live on daily earnings of around $10–20 from selling fish, meat, and produce at the wet market, driving a tricycle, or serving as household help. These services have enabled modest wage earners like me to enjoy a high standard of living in a country where $100 can go very far. When Metro Manila was ordered to shut down on March 15, some of these low wage earners lost their source of income instantly. Some of them pleaded to their government for help, saying that hunger, not COVID-19, will kill them. Their government, however, is incapable of providing an immediate and helpful response, so the more enterprising lot went about their business anyway and rejected social distancing measures.

The whole world knows by now, from the Wuhan example alone, that forced isolation and social distancing work. If most of us did not comply, our situation would have been dire and much worse than the current total of 17,000+ cases (3,909 recoveries, 957 deaths) out of 100+ million people. But even in a theoretical Wuhan-like quarantine, a leakage of desperate quarantine violators would be inevitable. The majority of our citizens need to work every day to survive, and they will, the prospect of prison time notwithstanding. They can get away too because they live in a free country so lacking in advanced law enforcement capabilities and with little-to-no provision for mass testing. Those who are sheltered in place will have to co-exist with those who wander about with or without a mask.

This renders public health safety, at least from where I live, dangerously inferior.

The only way I can leave my house without fear of infection is for a vaccine to be invented, approved for safety, and eventually injected into my bloodstream. Unfortunately, once that vaccine for COVID-19 ships, almost EVERYONE in the world would want it. Countries, where the laboratories working on a vaccine are located, will get first dibs. Countries with the resources that the Philippines does not have will be first in line, as always. The US, the current epicenter of the pandemic, will likely buy in the truckloads because they have more deaths, with COVID-19 cases there now approaching 2M out of the total 6M confirmed cases globally. Their president has already alerted the US Defense Department to manage manufacturing logistics.

This is the grim scenario I foresee as a citizen of a country entrenched in the lower end of the global economic spectrum. I know from my years of working in government what it is like to be the bullied child in international affairs — useful sometimes (i.e. strategic geopolitical assets), useless most of the time (i.e. no money, no influence). But at the height of a global health crisis, the Philippines and other developing nations should not be left to fend for themselves, despite our seeming irrelevance on the world stage. We have done what we could in sheltering our people and lowering the death toll. We need the COVID-19 vaccine just as much as every country does.

The question is, will we have equal access to the vaccine once it is ready to hit the market?