Will 'vaccine apartheid' and 'big Pharma bucks' further disrupt global tourism?
Dr. Taleb Rifai, a former Secretary General of UNWTO, speaking on the way out of the pandemic, at the “Tourism Business Retention and Expansion” webinar in Durban last month, said, “Countries will have to work together if tourism is to recover – one country cannot insist on quarantine while its neighbour demands a vaccination passport and a third simply requires 72 hours testing before arrival or at entry points. We do not want to turn this into a political game of those who have and those that have not. We will all lose if we do so. Fewer numbers may travel to a non-vaccinated destination and no vaccinated destination would accept receiving anyone from a non-vaccinated destination. Travel is about connecting everybody, everywhere.”
Travel is certainly about connecting everyone, anywhere. But, catching COVID-19 whilst traveling, from someone, somewhere… is certainly a ‘no go’. Take for example, the UK’s listing of countries into ‘green’ and ‘red’ categories. So long as countries get labeled as safe / unsafe to travel to, then air travel will most definitely be restricted. The only way travel restrictions will ease is when the vaccination rollouts are done quickly, done everywhere and given to everyone - at the same pace.
The good news, we are told, is that the vaccines work. However, much needs to be done to narrow the huge vaccine gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have not’s, between ‘rich’ and the ‘not so rich’. In the UK for instance, 33 million people have received the jab, whereas, in Sri Lanka it is just under a million (925,242 to be exact as at 23rd April 2021).
1/16th of the world’s population live in the US, Canada, UK and the EU and yet they have more than 50% of the world’s vaccine doses. An article published in the New York Times, in late March, reports that “residents of wealthy and upper middle income countries have reserved about 90% of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far”. (This is not talking into account the Russian and Chinese vaccines).
The Director General of the World Health Organisation, Dr Tedros Ghebureyesus has described the abysmal situation of the vaccine distribution as follows, “Distributing the bulk of vaccines to a handful of rich ex-colonial or settler-colonial states is not ‘vaccine nationalism’. Let us call it what it is – it is ‘vaccine apartheid’ at a global level”.
The ugly face of big Pharma in the west could be behind the campaign to discredit the Chinese and Russian manufactured vaccines. Bad enough the reluctance of the US and its allies to equitably share the vaccines they produce to the rest of the world, but to dissuade the world’s poor from using the Russian and Chinese produced vaccines is questionable. Isn’t any vaccine (despite its lower efficacy rate), and yet, capable of preventing or halting the spread of COVID-19, a preferable option to imminent death?
Arguably, there is big money to be made in the midst of all this misery.
In the meantime, the trip made by 50 Germans to Moscow (which was not in lockdown) to get their vaccine jabs because it was taking time to receive theirs back home in Germany, is another step towards ‘Vaccine tourism’.
Shafeek Wahab – Editor, Hospitality Sri Lanka, Consultant, Trainer, Ex- Hotelier
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