Vaccines for Bangladesh: A test of non-resident Bangladeshis’ influence

There are growing efforts among Bangladeshis living abroad to lobby their prospective governments to help send vaccines and other medical supplies to Bangladesh.

It occurs in parallel with a sense of helplessness, frustration and guilt among non-resident Bangladeshis unable to retain the same sense of connection with their ancestral land during the pandemic.

In a zoom meeting held last month, Professor Shahidullah, a senior member of the Bangladesh government's technical advisory committee regarding the response to Covid-19, encouraged a meeting of over a hundred Bangladeshi community leaders living in Australia to do what they could regarding improving vaccine supply. "It is also highly laudable the contribution made by Bangladeshi Australian community to socioeconomic development of Australia and at the same time having empathy for Bangladeshi people fighting against Covid pandemic."

The Australian Minister for Immigration, Alex Hawke, joined the meeting. He agreed to communicate to the Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison the urgency of the need for greater vaccine supply in Bangladesh and the grave fears of the local, one hundred thousand strong Bangladeshi community.

Minister Hawke outlined the priorities Australia had in helping their Pacific neighbours such as Papua New Guinea and Fiji, who were suffering severe outbreaks of their own.

In partnership with New Zealand, Australia had already sent tens of thousands of doses to both countries. Indonesia is also suffering horrific deaths and neighbours Australia. The Indonesians have been dependent on the Chinese Sinopharm but there have been questions regarding the vaccine's effectiveness with many health workers dying in spite of being fully vaccinated.

The Morrison government has promised to send 15 million coronavirus vaccine doses to Pacific nations and Timor-Leste by mid-2022, helping Australia pull ahead of China in "vaccine diplomacy" to build regional influence.

This example illustrates the trend of rich countries sending vaccines to poor countries for both urgent need but also for great power politics as even the richest countries struggle for supply.

Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, but was unable to secure the supply of vaccines to rapidly inoculate the population. Now half the country is in strict lockdown.

The country of Poland, not known as a great power, has agreed to send half a million doses of Pfizer's vaccine to Australia. This will be both helpful but somewhat humiliating.

Locally, there was anxiety about the AstraZeneca vaccine and the minuscule potential of blood clots, a hesitancy luxury only a wealthy nation like Australia could even contemplate. Meanwhile the excess AstraZeneca supply is being donated to Pacific islands and the COVAX facility.

The example of Australia highlights the challenges of nonresident Bangladeshis living in rich countries like Britain and America, who are desperately trying to mobilise and lobby their respective governments to channel some of their vaccine diplomacy towards Bangladesh.

The US has sent Bangladesh 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine under the international supply platform COVAX. It was approved for emergency use on June 29.

Bangladesh is also set to receive six million more doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines this month. Meanwhile China is stepping up its vaccine giving, pledging a million doses of its Sinopharm jab. There are also hopes that India will resume manufacturing the AstraZeneca variety for use in Bangladesh, something promised but not delivered due to the country's own pandemic crisis.

Professor Shahidullah told the meeting with Australian- Bangladeshi leaders that a group of American-Bangladeshis had been able to co-ordinate a small supply of Pfizer vaccines to send directly to Bangladesh. There have also been efforts by the large Bangladeshi community in the UK, especially to get urgent supplies to Sylhet.

But the British government has held firm instead, planning to be strict about using the COVAX facility overseen by the World Health Organization and UNICEF.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced that the UK will donate more than 100 million doses of Covid vaccine to poorer countries in the next year.

COVAX has been criticised for being slow. Planned targets were initially missed, partly as a result of the limited health infrastructure in recipient countries but also because of vaccine hesitancy.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has shone a stark light on the contrast between the rich and poor, both within nations and between the North and South. As an April editorial in the British Medical Journal outlined: "The unequal burden of Covid-19 is etched along ethnic and racial lines."

While during the initial stage of the pandemic the focus may have been on specific rich countries like Italy, Britain or America, that is no longer the case.

A May Brookings Institute paper argues, especially after events with the Delta variant this year, Covid-19 is primarily a developing country pandemic. This is especially true when unreported cases and excess deaths are incorporated into measurements. At the time of that publication, seventy percent of all vaccine shots were given in just six rich countries.

This brings a degree of guilt and helplessness for Bangladeshis living in the West. They are freely able to enjoy the fruits of having access to world class health systems, but unable to help their relatives who cannot. Nor can they travel freely to see their relatives during which they might have supplied them with extra resources beyond money, including medicines.

While their influence is likely to be peripheral at best, the next stage of the pandemic may represent a test of how organised and influential nonresident Bangladeshis can be. It is this upcoming stage of six to twelve months that will highlight to what extent the international community can come together to inoculate the world.

Otherwise, the repeated saying of "we're all in it together" or the argument that none of us are safe until all of us are safe will ring hollow.

Dr Tanveer Ahmed is an Australia-based psychiatrist, and can be reached at drtahmed@gmail.com