https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-vaccination-passports-7a8ce11ce37c309d97969ab71df26e62
Whether the subject is access to healthy food, clean water, or electricity, the ability to heat one's home or cool it down, the availability of health care, and many other markers of a modern nation-state, some countries have worked that out for most of their citizens. Others have not.
The world's natural, technological, and organizational resources are not distributed equally across the planet. We humans do not have equal access to the world's luxuries or to its necessities -- obviously. Does that constitute an injustice or, to use the more happenin' term these days, an inequity?
According to AP:
"Most countries don’t have enough vaccine, highlighting the fraught ethical landscape of who can get it and how to lift the burden of COVID-19..."
"The core human rights principle is equity and nondiscrimination,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on National and Global Health Law.
“There’s a huge moral crisis in equity globally because in high income countries like Israel or the United States or the EU countries, we’re likely to get to herd immunity by the end of this year,” he said. “But for many low-income countries, most people won’t be vaccinated for many years. Do we really want to give priority to people who already have so many privileges?”
Who is the "we" who is being accused of giving priority to high income countries? Fortunately for Americans, the World Health Organization does not rule the world. If it did, it might dole out the vaccine by fiat, allocating so many doses per country or race or ethnic group or religion or gender or sexual orientation.
It's not that people in North America or Europe are more deserving than people living elsewhere. We're not. But the leaders of wealthier and better organized countries, like the leaders of poorer countries with less sophisticated infrastructures, have a primary duty to their own citizens, their own inhabitants, in much the same way that parents have a primary responsibility to care for their own children. And parents tend to take care of their own kids before they look to see what they can do for the neighbors' kids. Not only is that human nature; it's also human wisdom.
