COVID-19 Pandemic and Vaccine Imperialism

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed and exacerbated the global inequalities regarding the availability and access to vaccines. Many terms have appeared in the academic literature ("vaccine colonialism," "vaccine nationalism," "vaccine apartheid") trying to capture and interpret these inequalities, failing in most cases to realistically explain the upstream causes of the observed injustices. A Marxist perspective on the contrary emphasizes the structural causes of inequalities in capitalism and attributes them to the existence of economic exploitation. "Vaccine imperialism," which refers to the control that advanced industrialized countries exert on the development, production, and distribution of vaccines at the expense of less-developed economies, can describe and explain in a more realistic way the observed inequalities during the pandemic. Our study proposes a circuit of vaccine imperialism that explains how economic imperialist exploitation takes place via transfers of value from less-developed economies (vaccine recipient countries) to imperialist economies (vaccine producing and patent holder countries) using four different channels: (a) protection of intellectual property (IP) rights (patents), (b) earnings from royalty payments for the use of vaccines (monopolistic prices and profits), (c) exercise of monopoly power on the production and distribution of vaccines (control over the quantity of vaccines supplied, exclusion of competitors through vaccine licensing), and (d) public debt servicing.