Covert racism and vaccine rollout

By Bhaskar Anand

The word “racism” commonly refers to the 16th-century European colonial idea that white men were superior, and could thus enslave people of Asian or African descent. By the end of the 20th century, most cases of colonialism and slavery had ended with independence or autonomy across Asia and Africa.

However, the inexplicable roots of the obnoxious plague of racism remain in society today and continue to proliferate. The exploding upsurge of the coronavirus, its rapid and deadly variants, and the limited number of available vaccine doses have ushered in the seeming need to categorize people based on their priority according to particular public health criteria. With such categorization, the seemingly quiet racist biases of society have become loudly evident.

Recently, racist biases have gone through several phases of metamorphosis, leading to previously muted racist snobbery. For instance, vaccine hesitancy is a multifaceted issue, shaped by several influential factors, such as individual confidence, assurance, appraisal, expediency, collective responsibility, etc.

However, administrators and politicians often use vaccine hesitancy as a scapegoat to justify the racial gap in who is vaccinated, which is often more the result of structural racism. As a matter of fact, vaccine hesitancy is an outcome of a racist past that leads to mistrust in the healthcare system and the government, due to unethical medical trials on minority groups having resulted in the profound fear of certain human beings being used as “guinea pigs.”

In December 1965, the UN passed the general assembly resolution on an international convention, and in 1969, called for the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination. However, racial prejudice is still persistent in political agendas and administrative practices. They exist in utter disregard of the recent social campaign run by the U.N., “Youth Standing up against Racism.”

This campaign engaged the public through the #FightRacism hashtag as well as aiming to foster a global culture of resilience, coexistence and anti-discrimination, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with the coronavirus, a parallel social virus has continued to mushroom, with hatred, violence and fear against certain ethnicities and nationalities.

Nations in the 21st century are no longer separated or isolated from each other in terms of the political boundaries they had in the 16th century. Countries' contemporary geopolitical and socioeconomic interdependence, with its deep foundations in modern globalization and transnational cultural exchange, challenges the new imposition of national boundaries and isolation due to the spread of COVID-19.

In today's world, both developed as well as developing economies should behave as a collective global village to share resources and achieve sustainable development. However, it can be seen that several countries around the world have implemented selfish policies for fighting off this global pandemic by only selectively providing and sharing vaccines. This narcissistic approach endangers the lives of the entire population, and originates from looking down at a racially segregated group that might have a lower socioeconomic status within the specific national context in question.

With the unprecedented loss of life of over 4 million people due to the current global COVID-19 crisis, we cannot afford any race-based disparities in the vaccine rollout and receipt processes. Racial prejudice in the vaccine rollout will exacerbate the current humanitarian crisis.

Hence, there is a pressing need for intergovernmental intervention from the U.N. and WHO, to negotiate terms between the governments of different countries and establish a more reliable framework convention for equitable vaccine access and provision so as to avoid any nationalistic and racially biased dogfights. We, as human beings, have the moral responsibility to keep our racial biases aside and act more responsibly. In this dire situation, we can only save ourselves by saving others.

Bhaskar Anand (www.bhaskaranandjha.com) is a doctoral student working in the field of air quality and material application at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Hanyang University.