An article by Barbie Latza Nadeau in The Daily Beast quotes the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyeus, as saying the following:

Vaccine Nationalism where a handful of nations have taken the lion's share [of vaccine doses] is morally indefensible and an ineffective public health strategy."

The international staff at KTracy.com disagrees strongly with this position. To suggest this is "nationalism" is ridiculous. "Vaccine Patronism" is a better term for this as the vaccines are first going to the people who paid for them. However, for lack of a better term, we've decided to use "Vaccine Nationalism" for now.

"If the United States were to try to help others before itself, our economy would still be in shambles and the amount of help we could render would be seriously limited."

What really bothered us at KTracy.com about the artcile in question was that it specifically singles out the United States by comparing the 332 million shots administered to a population of 372 million to the 66 million shots delivered to Africa with a population of 1.3 billion. This comparison itself is radically unfair for a number of reasons, including the governmental and logistical challenges of delivering superchilled vaccines to a continent largely suffering from tribal, political, and religious conflicts unseen by the rest of the world that the continent is largely untrusting of for obvious reasons.

More significantly, the citizens in the United States have for decades paid outrageous prices for perscription medicines relative to the rest of the world. The explanation American citizens had been given for generations is that this is the cost of the research and development that makes American healthcare the best on the planet for those who can afford it. American families of every walk of life have experenced extreme financial hardships due to these outrageous and seemingly unfair prices. When the China Virus first started spreading, these American drug companies were the first to develop truly effective vaccines. These vaccines rightfully been offered to Americans first. This is not a privilege. The citizens of the United States of America have paid an enormous price in the form of suffering and hardship for this access.

Furthermore, the government of the United States is paying for these vaccines at the cost of future generations of American citizens and at the immediate cost of nations that hold and purchase American debt. If you look at the top 34 countries that hold the most American debt, the one thing they all have in common (aside from holding American debt) is that none of them are in Africa.

The article correctly points out the risk of letting the China Virus spread like wildfire in Africa and potentially mutate into something worse. However, to date, the American vaccines have proven effective against all variants of the China Virus. It stands to reason that any African mutations will also likely be able to be prevented with the American vaccines.

Africa is an extremely complicated place in a geopolitical sense, as are its diverse set of problems. As we saw with the Ebola outbreak several years ago, many African countries are critically deficient in being able to provide their own medical care. Vaccine development and drug research is less of an immediate problem when a significant portion of the population can't even get clean drinking water and political instability and poverty make reliable domestic funding almost impossible.

The people of the United States and the rest of the world are morally obligated to assist those in Africa. And the United States is reaching a point where it makes sense to begin sending doses to Africa. However, to put foreigners before American citizens for American vaccines that have been paid for with extreme hardship and financial ruin for millions of families would be horribly unjust.

If the United States were to try to help others before itself, our economy would still be in shambles and the amount of help we could render would be seriously limited. When you're on a airplane and the oxygen masks drop from the overhead compartment, you're told to put your own mask on before assisting children or those around you. To use that as an analogy may sound patronizing, but it's applicable here. Africa is dependent on the United States and the rest of the world for help. It took the United States several months, but we're getting closer to being in a position to render that assistance. The United States is by far the most generous nation on earth, so I have no doubt the Biden administration will soon be sending doses to Africa and an international army of vaccinated medical teams to administer them.

Progressives in the United States have always been fans of golden showers, but they would stop encouraging the world to piss on the United States long enough for us to help those in need, that would be great.