Bill Gates' Vaccine Colonialism Is Harmful to the World
After weeks of immense pressure, the Biden administration came out in support of waiving intellectual property rights to coronavirus vaccines. Shortly after the Biden announcement earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also reversed course and endorsed the patent waiver. But Bill Gates himself, subject to revived scrutiny around sexual misconduct and perhaps the most powerful person in global health, hasn’t budged.
While United States residents are being quickly vaccinated and may see an end to the pandemic in sight, most countries in the world will likely have to wait years for many of their vaccine doses, in a situation being described as “vaccine apartheid.” Almost half of all vaccine shots have been administered in just 16 rich countries, and India is weathering a horrific coronavirus crisis.
This could have been avoided. Early last year, countries in the Global South compelled the World Health Organization to unveil a technology sharing pool, C-TAP, that would have removed intellectual property barriers for accessing Covid-19 treatments and vaccines.
