Actually, the rich countries of the world wanted to show solidarity: Even before vaccines against Covid-19 were available, 190 countries agreed to reserve vaccines for the world's poor: They joined the Covax vaccine alliance, founded by the World Health Organization.
"Nobody is safe until everyone is safe," was the motto.
Now the vaccines are there, but hardly anyone wants to know anything about solidarity in the fight against the epidemic.
The EU, US, Canada and other wealthy nations are suffering from their populations unhappy with the speed of vaccination.
They paid a lot of money to Covax, but they use their vaccines for national campaigns.
The poor country of Honduras will therefore have to be content with 25 doses of vaccine by March - not 25,000 or even 25 million.
Does the global struggle for helping drugs cost the world economy more than a long-term, global vaccination campaign?
In the international podcast "Eight Billion", host Olaf Heuser talks about this with two guests: Elisabeth Massute from "Doctors Without Borders" deals with fair and affordable access to essential medicines.
She says: “We live in a globalized world, people will travel again and the virus will cross borders again.
It is important to prevent this. «It must be about protecting as many people as possible and saving human lives.
"And we can only do that if we try to contain this pandemic together in solidarity and take global action."
SPIEGEL correspondent Laura Höflinger in Bangalore reports on the unusual situation in South Asia: India also secured its own vaccine stocks, but is giving away millions of vaccine doses to neighboring countries.
"The Indians were incredibly proud of it - and that is also because they were faster than the Chinese."
The world's largest vaccine factories are located in India and for this reason alone, says Laura Höflinger, the country will play an important, perhaps even decisive role in the fight against the corona pandemic.
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