The COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic has dealt a serious blow to the progress and stability of humanity in its quest to realise a sustainable future. The position of libraries and other key stakeholders in the development equation needs a fundamental rethinking in order to build capacity to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and its mutations. The challenges being encountered by developing countries in accessing COVID-19 vaccines serve as a wakeup call for all institutions to rethink, redefine, and restrategise how they can work in unison to provide solutions to save humanity from the effects of vaccine nationalism. The positions of all key stakeholders should resonate with the aspirations of the progressive world to ensure cooperation and camaraderie in ensuring egalitarian access to the COVID-19 vaccinations. This chapter seeks to unpack the phenomenon of the COVID-19 vaccine apartheid and raise awareness on the role of access to credible information in the wake of the pandemic.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has unprecedented damage and disruption to human lives throughout the world. The COVID-19 vaccination program presents the world with an opportunity to cooperate and collaborate to ensure that everyone is vaccinated against the deadly virus. However, the goal to realize global access to COVID-19 vaccines has been affected by a myriad of factors including vaccine nationalism, vaccine hesitancy, information disorder, mistrust, lack of capital, restrictions on patents, and poor response tools among other factors. Access to COVID-19 vaccines and scientific information to raise awareness of the program for the benefit of policymakers and citizens has become crucial to ensure the success of the program. Libraries as information hubs cannot afford to standby instead they should be proactive and serve as a frontier in the fight against the pandemic (Chisita, 2020). These institutions are part of the solution to the pandemic because of their indispensable roles in providing access to credible information to ensure that citizens are well informed about the pandemic. Berlin, (2008) highlighted that the intensification of globalization and environmental degradation spurred global health, development scholars, and practitioners to call for a fundamental rethink on the world's growing microbial interdependence and the need to strategically plan on how to manage a probable global disease outbreak. Wipfli, & Luo, (March, 2021) viewed the 2003 SARS CoV-2 outbreak as a warning signal from mother nature that spurred international institutional action to improve global public goods for health. The authors cite the International Health Regulations (WHO, 2008), the WHO Global Vaccine Sharing Plan (GVAP), (2013), the Global Health Security Agenda and Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (2016) are critical cooperative and collaborative efforts to tackle the global COVID-19 pandemic.
GVAP aimed to realize the vision of the Decade of Vaccines (DoV), of “a world in which all individuals and communities enjoy lives free of vaccine-preventable diseases” (MacDonald, Mohsni, Al-Mazrou, Andrus, Arora, Elden, Madrid, Martin, Mustafa, Rees, and Salisbury, (2020). Ingstad Sandberg, Andresen, Gopinathan, & Hustad Hembre, (2020) notes that the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014 -2016 revealed lacunae in global structures for collaboration. This pandemic prompted organizations and individuals representing science, industry, states, and civil society to form CEPI as a pillar in the global response to fight the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Carethers, (2021) argued that people have no protective immunity against the novel COVID-19 and that the bug has become a constant pandemic for the global population beginning in 2020 and into 2021.
Stephenson, (2021) noted that high-income nations already have contracted more than half of the total doses of COVID-19 vaccine doses while the low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have access to only enough vaccine doses to cover approximately one-third of their populations, according to an analysis from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) (Hamel, Kirzinger, Lopes, Kearney, Sparks, & Brodie, 2021). Stephenson (2021) and Kirzinger (2021) argued that widespread global access to COVID-19 vaccines should be viewed as a priority to avert cases and loss of lives and a solution to the realization of the global population immunity and controlling the pandemic.
The global COVID-19 vaccination campaign will be the largest in history. The delivery of COVID-19 vaccines presents challenges unprecedented in scale, speed and specificities, especially in low- and middle-income countries. The World Bank (2021) cited the lack of access to adequate vaccines and vaccine preparedness as obstacles to reaching global population immunity in LMICs.