The case for a fair and equitable roll out of Covid vaccines is clear, but the developed world is failing to heed it. Buddhism teaches that a generous response is also a wise one
The case for global vaccine equity seems straightforward. As the UN puts it, ‘all people, wherever they are in the world, should have equal access to a vaccine which offers protection against Covid-19.’ Governments have signed up to the Covax collaboration to share vaccines fairly. But the World Health Organisation produced a Global Vaccination Strategy this week that spells out the challenge. To tackle Covid we need to vaccinate seventy percent of the world’s people, and the target date is mid-2022. But while vaccination rates are already seventy percent in some high income countries, in the poorest they are just one percent.
The argument extends beyond fairness. The more virus that’s out there, the more easily it can spread and mutate. We also heard from the IMF this week that Covid in the developing world can derail the global recovery, and from UN that the same countries can only prioritise biodiversity if they have help with vaccines.
For Buddhism, the great error we make as human beings is to cling to a sense of fixed and separate selfhood. In the face of the pain, impermanence and insubstantiality of our lives, we crave security, and the most fundamental of all cravings is the desire to exist as a substantial and permanent self.
The problem is that our desire for security obscures the truth that ‘each great I’ is, as WH Auden says, ‘a process in a process in a field that never closes.’ The Buddha describes selfhood in similar ways, but his real concern is that what he calls self-clinging is the ultimate source of our suffering. Happiness, he once said, comes when, rather than huddling in own our house – literal or metaphorical – we open up the thatch and let in the rain.
The most basic Buddhist practice isn’t meditation; it’s generosity because giving is the most straightforward way to go beyond self-clinging. Friends and relatives are naturally the first recipients of our generosity in Buddhist teachings. But charity, and vaccine provision, that ends at home becomes, in Buddhist thought, a kind of extended selfishness.
Protecting national interests and prioritising our own citizens is a core tenet of government. But if Covid has taught us anything, it’s surely the interdependence and connectivity of the world as a whole. If we fail to meet the vaccine equity test, we risk creating suffering not just for those currently missing out, but for ourselves as well.
