The Third Wave that Shouldn’t Have Been
Image source: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/11/ugandan-minister-blames-west-for-countrys-covid-vaccine-shortage. Nicholas Bamulanzeki/AP
There was a time last fall 2020 when friends and connections in Uganda would read the news of COVID-19 in the United States, and they would message me to express their concern. By early December about 3,000 people were dying of COVID daily in the U.S.; while in Uganda, fewer than 300 people had died in total. Uganda’s government had quickly halted all public gathering and travel in the early months of 2020, and so their early wave of cases was barely a blip. COVID was so rare that many were calling it a “disease of the rich,” affecting only the few who lived or went abroad. By the end of the year, people were commuting and working as normal, children were back in school, and businesses were open.
Today the situation is reversed. I have been vaccinated, like over 60 percent of people in my state, while Uganda is experiencing a dangerous COVID third wave and has returned to total lockdown. This time around, research team members tell me about COVID patients in their own small towns and trading centers. Getting exact numbers of cases and deaths is difficult, but they are certainly rising rapidly. And so far, the country has vaccinated less than 1 million people—about 2 percent of the entire country. They have been waiting on committed vaccines from India, but that country has stopped or slowed exports as it deals with its own devastating second wave. Uganda’s public hospitals are becoming crowded and oxygen resources are running low. I worry, now, for those I know there.
Vaccine equality and vaccine nationalism are becoming big topics on the world stage, even as many Americans are caught up in the politics of vaccine safety, hesitancy, and regional disparity. The current director of UNAIDS, Ugandan Winnie Byanyima, has been vocal about the need for global vaccine equality; but as she says, about three quarters of all vaccines have been administered in just 10 countries. While U.S. President Biden has pledged to send millions of excess doses to under-vaccinated nations, these commitments are paltry compared to the need.
What drives this inequity is patent and intellectual property laws that limit the sharing of vaccine-producing technologies and expertise; and the priority given to contracts with wealthy and influential countries by vaccine-producing companies like Pfizer. In fact, last year the U.S. government strongarmed Pfizer to prioritize its own contracts—briefly halting shipments to all other countries—when it was trying to ramp up its own vaccination schedule. The U.S. vaccine donation plan is a limited fix for a problem it helped create.
Perhaps this does not seem that shocking to most Americans; after all, is it not the role of the President to prioritize his own citizens? And why shouldn’t wealthy nations employ their resources to protect their own from such threats? Yet vaccine nationalism should trouble us when it more value on certain persons over others, based on a category of “national identity.” It is an affront to other humanizing ideals: the inherent worth and dignity of all human persons, the imperative of compassion and care for all who are vulnerable, even the imago Dei (“image of God”) principle within Christian teaching.
It can certainly be harder to find solidarity with persons on the other side of the world, the way one finds belonging with their family or local community. Even global cosmopolitanism as an alternative to nationalism, which ostensibly calls for solidarity with the general “other” around the world, often defaults to identification via other means: class, education, and politics. Yet this does not mean that strong nationalism is inevitable. We may have difficulty imagining a third way, that holds together the intimacy and local-ness of human belonging with the universality of human value. Nonetheless, imagining that third way is exactly the work we need to do.
There didn’t need to be a third wave of COVID-19 in Uganda. The country came out of its lockdown as global vaccine production was well underway; and a strategic and coordinated vaccination plan prioritizing health care staff and high-risk groups, along with targeted supports of food and basic necessities for those without their own farmland or savings, would likely have prevented the current lockdown and strain on health care systems.
I care about this third wave because I know people there. I worry about my staff persons, about the women caregivers featured on this website, and about the people they serve. Not everyone can or will care about every place equally. But in a world in which such transnational relations and forms of care can and do happen, they will always push nationalism to its limits, raising questions without easy answers. This indeed is the stumbling block of the imago Dei: the beauty and challenge of our shared sacred worth. We cannot, especially now, turn away.