Canada recently announced that starting July 5th, fully vaccinated passengers who are authorized to travel, which includes international students, will no longer be required to quarantine at home. As a returning international student from Dubai, this update was pleasantly welcome as I had been fully vaccinated in late February with the Sinopharm vaccine. However, only people who received Canadian-approved vaccines一Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, and AstraZeneca一are eligible.
Therefore, individuals—such as myself and many others in non-western countries 一 who had received other vaccinations like Sinopharm or Sputnik, which are popular among non-western regions due to its affordability and production sites, would not be exempt. In a world where conversations of “vaccine passports” and restrictions are opening up as the world moves toward normalcy, one anxiety prevails – did I get the right vaccine?
“Were all in this together,” “Take the vaccine as soon as you can” and similar phrases were reverberated by global leaders throughout the world as Covid-19 vaccine campaigns started to gain momentum. While Pfizer was the first vaccine to get approved and distributed around parts of the world, Chinese-made Sinopharm was the first vaccine made by a non-Western country to be approved by the WHO for emergency use in early May this year; after already having millions of doses administered in China and the UAE. Many jumped at the opportunity to do their part in protecting themselves and their communities by getting the vaccine that was first made available to them.
When the Canadian government announced in early June that “vaccinated Canadians could soon be allowed to skip the hotel stay and—after receiving a negative COVID-19 test—the rest of the 14-day entry quarantine that has been required since February for people entering the country,” many international students coming from non-western countries who hadn’t had the privilege of taking one of the Canadian approved vaccines were exempt from this update. Along with Sinopharm, another widely distributed vaccine, Sputnik V that has been distributed across “Russia, Mexico, India and several South American countries, including Brazil and Argentina” is also not on the Canadian approved vaccine list.
Canadians, healthcare workers, family members, and international students alike are currently faced with the same questions about “how did we do the right thing by getting vaccinated and yet are being discriminated against for which vaccine we took?” Health authorities all over the world, including in North America have urged individuals to get whichever vaccine is made available to them as soon as possible to contribute in the fight against Covid-19. McGill University itself released multiple statements in their coronavirus updates saying “If you live elsewhere: We would encourage you to get vaccinated as soon as the vaccine is available to you” and “get your first—or second—vaccination as soon as you can” on May 13th and June 7th respectively. While there is no doubt that getting vaccinated was the right thing to do, living in a world where vaccine diplomacy and vaccine passports are just around the corner, one cannot help but feel a new sort of discrimination when it comes to the selection of approved vaccines to alleviate restrictions. Moreover, the fact that the approved vaccines only contain western made vaccines despite there being others, like Sinopharm, that received WHO approval is greatly concerning.
Supply and demand for vaccines – affecting the effectiveness of vaccine distribution, vaccine hesitancy
Given the “shocking imbalance in the global distribution of vaccines” highlighted by WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the approval of the Sinopharm jab by the WHO came with the expectation of reducing the rich-poor divide of accessibility to covid-19 vaccines and protect vulnerable populations. Furthermore, Ghebreyesus added that the approval would aid in giving countries “confidence to expedite their own regulatory approval” which evidently has not been the case so far despite WHO validating the “safety, efficacy and quality” of the jab. The addition of the Sinopharm jab to the global Covax programme came with the intention of improving access to vaccinations to poorer nations struggling with supply. Its “easy storage requirements” made the Sinopharm vaccine “highly suitable for low-resource settings.” However, upon a cross-sectional analysis, we can see that all of these efforts become diluted when governmental regulations encourage a wave of vaccine discrimination prompting greater anxieties over getting vaccinated and further ostracizing those who are vaccinated with non-western-made vaccines. This new regulation disproportionately affects people coming from developing nations and vaccinated people whose vaccine simply does not make the cut.
When considering global vaccine supply shortages and allocation inequalities, it is worth pointing out that Canada itself was titled the top vaccine hoarder by preordering “8.9 doses per head” according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance late last year, enough to vaccine over 5 times its total population whereas much of the developing world continues to struggle even partially vaccinated its populations.
Vaccine diplomacy and vaccine passports
The WHO itself has urged countries to “recognize all its approved vaccines to avoid developing discriminatory travel systems” exemplified by recent changes to Canada’s travel restrictions. Similarly, the European Union has made amendments to its travel restrictions enabling vaccinated travelers to be exempt from some COVID-19 restrictions. The EU’s vaccine passport, much like what is expected from Canada’s, “only accepts vaccines approved by its own regulator.” This is despite having nations within the EU, such as Hungary, that have “authorized and administered other jabs such as China’s Sinovac and Russia’s Sputnik V.”
With all things considered, global vaccination campaigns are integral to curbing the pandemic and resuming any normalcy. However, it is equally essential for governments to assess their privileges and acknowledge the inequalities between countries, especially in times of crisis. Creating a vaccine hierarchy or tiered system runs the risk of greater vaccine hesitancy, lower vaccination rates, vaccine discrimination, all of which will only prolong the pandemic and its ancillary effects.
Edited by Helia Mokhber
Aakanksha Mathur is a second-year student at McGill University studying International Development Studies and Communication Studies. She is engrossed in understanding and evaluating global humanitarian issues and the effects of media in politics. Having lived her entire life in a cultural melting pot, Dubai, she has a keen interest in assessing topics via a cross-cultural perspective.