The Impact of COVID-19 Vaccine Nationalism on Global Health and Human Rights to Health Standards

Abstract

The pursuit of ending the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on the surfacing and rollout of vaccines to be utilized by people around the world. However, vaccine nationalism hinders the world’s poorest countries to have access to vaccines. This article puts into perspective the impact of vaccine nationalism on global health. It also underlines its repercussions on the universal rights to health standards and identifies avenues to be followed for equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine, necessary to the containment of the pandemic. The study makes use of secondary data to gain a better understanding of problems associated with vaccine nationalism. We searched PubMed, CINAHL, and EMBASE databases, websites maintained by the United Nations (like the World Health Organization [WHO]), national and international newspapers, and grey literature using a predetermined search strategy to identify all relevant qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods studies related specifically to the aim of this study. Its findings prove that vaccine nationalism has a negative impact on global health by posing a predicament or a delay in ending the pandemic, and furthermore, it violates human rights to health standards of the global population. Therefore, to encourage the international sharing of the COVID-19 vaccine, enforceable frameworks for vaccine development and distribution are needed and should be managed by an established international platform like the WHO.