While Europe sleeps between vaccines

A medic administers a dose of the COVID-19 vaccine at the Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, Johannesburg, South Africa.Themba Hadebe / AP

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While rich countries are enthralled with the great debate about which vaccine we prefer and at what age we want it and that if my brother-in-law has already been injected and why not me, most of the world is suffering pain and death for not having injections for its people. Ask a Senegalese if he prefers Pfizer or Janssen and you will see him laugh for the first time in a long time. Tuberculosis kills 1.5 million people every year in the developing world, but in 2020 it caused half a million more deaths than in previous years, the WHO estimates. The reason is that scarce health resources in poor countries have had to be diverted to covid patients, and therefore half a million people have been left without the tuberculosis treatment that would have saved their lives. Pfizer or Janssen, Iranian or Beluga caviar,what a great dilemma for the future of humanity.

The macabre accounting of the three million deaths from covid in the world would be much, much worse if we include the deaths from the health collapse that has caused the pandemic. The latest data indicate that these collateral victims outnumber those caused by the coronavirus itself. It is not just tuberculosis. Campaigns against measles, polio and meningitis have also come to a halt. As strange as it may sound to a Western citizen, measles is a deadly disease in the developing world, and polio will leave many people paralyzed or disabled for life. They are avoidable tragedies, but only if that population receives anticovid vaccines as soon as possible. That

is a dilemma, not of caviar.

India went into lockdown a year or so ago, in March 2020, and in the months that followed, experts saw a unique effect: the daily number of new TB cases had fallen by as much as 70%, reports Leslie Roberts for

. India is the only country in the world that records TB data in real time. And the drop in the number of registered cases could only indicate that the diagnosis was failing. In a big way, to be precise. A year after that lockdown, the WHO estimates that people receiving tuberculosis treatment have fallen by more than one million during 2020, of which half have died. Collateral victims of an unequal world.

The Stop TB consortium in Geneva and Imperial College London have built downright pessimistic mathematical models for tuberculosis by 2025. If we add measles, polio and meningitis, these preventable diseases will become a slaughterer. even more effective than covid. Forgetting to vaccinate the poor world against the coronavirus is a mistake that will remain etched in the relentless steel of history, to the shame of future generations. Where are those analysts who predicted that humanity would come out of the pandemic improved? What have your arguments, what are your illusions? Organizing a better world is a tiring task, isn't it?