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Hayat-Vax: will the UAE-produced vaccine stem the Middle East Covid tide?

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Last week, Emirati authorities announced Hayat-Vax – the country’s locally manufactured, rebranded version of the Chinese vaccine Sinopharm – had entered production, on the same day the World Health Organisation (WHO) officially recommended Sinopharm for use in the battle against Covid-19. As the Emirati announcement points out, large segments of the country have already been inoculated against Covid-19, with over 11 million vaccine doses administered to a population of just under 10 million people and 40% of residents already fully vaccinated. This makes the UAE the top-performing vaccinator in the entire region outside of Israel, which has fully vaccinated nearly 60% of its population (though the latter number pointedly does not include Palestinians living in occupied territory).

Unfortunately, Israel and the UAE represent the exception rather than the norm when it comes to inoculating Middle Eastern populations. The region’s most populous country, Egypt, has only vaccinated 1% of its population of over 100 million people. Iran, which became one of the earliest epicenters of Covid-19 in February 2020, is already on its fourth wave, with government officials admitting their reported death toll of over 76,000 could be underestimating the real tally by a factor of four. Even so, less than 2% of the 83 million people in Iran have received even one dose of a vaccine, with the country’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei notoriously demanding his officials refuse vaccines from the “untrustworthy” West.

Europe’s non-existent vaccine footprint

While Khamenei got himself sanctioned by Twitter for alleging the United States and United Kingdom “would want to contaminate other nations” and that “French vaccines aren’t trustworthy either,” the truth is that Europe as a whole has done little to address the chronic shortages of vaccines plaguing the Middle East. While EU officials like Commission Vice-President for Interinstitutional Relations Maroš Šefčovič trumpet the 200 million vaccines the bloc has shipped overseas, over 70 million of those have gone to Japan. Out of the whole Middle East, the Commission can only point to 12 million combined doses sent to Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Even in the places where Europe claims to have contributed to Mideastern vaccination drives, such as by offering billions of Euros in financing to the COVAX mechanism set up to deliver vaccines to low-income countries, the bloc has in reality undercut the scheme by buying up far more doses than it needs and setting up its own competing donation scheme out of ‘soft power’ concerns. Even when Western vaccines do make it to the region, political decisions taken in Europe have served to undercut already shaky public confidence in other parts of the world.

This is especially true for the vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, which makes up the vast majority of COVAX’s vaccine stockpile. Global public health officials may insist that AstraZeneca’s benefits far outweigh any potential risks, but confidence in this particular vaccine has been badly shaken worldwide by the blood clot scares that prompted temporary bans on its use in EU countries. In places like Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, and Kuwait, those mixed signals have compounded existing mistrust in governments and high levels of misinformation about the safety of Covid vaccines, resulting in vaccine acceptance rates as low as 23% in Kuwait.

From Arab factories to Arab pharmacies

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By virtue of being produced in the Middle East, the UAE’s Hayat-Vax could resolve many of the issues plaguing public acceptance of other vaccines. Sinopharm has been widely used by Emiratis themselves, with the country approving the vaccine in early December and relying on it for the bulk of the country’s inoculations thus far.

That real-world experience provides a valuable counter to the types of concerns currently surrounding mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer/BioNTech, whose innovative technology also makes them a magnet for scepticism and disinformation. Given how many falsehoods regarding vaccines play upon Muslim religious and cultural concerns, such as claims that they contain trace amounts of pork or alcohol, the knowledge that Hayat-Vax is produced within the region could reassure many of those currently hesitant to get vaccinated.

Hayat-Vax’s credibility could also be reinforced by the egalitarianism that underlined the Emirates’ own vaccination rollout. Defying the stratified nature of their societies and the divisions that normally exist between native citizens and foreign workers, the UAE and its Gulf neighbours met the challenge of the virus by ensuring high levels of medical care and attention in the migrant communities most at risk of contracting Covid.

As Dr. Rana Hajjeh, director of programme management for the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean regional office, told the Lebanese outlet L’Orient-Le-Jour : “It’s important to emphasize that in these countries, the first cases emerged within migrant communities who live in difficult conditions or in close proximity, but their medical needs were covered in their entirety, and they were cared for just like the rest of the population.” In the UAE’s case, the emphasis on equality has extended to the vaccination drive, with Haaretz reporting migrant workers in the Emirates “have been vaccinated at a record pace” while those in other Gulf countries face discrimination in access.

The most egregious example of vaccine inequality, however, may be in Israel, where the world-leading vaccination rate does not reflect the refusal of Israeli authorities to take responsibility for sharing vaccines with the Palestinian territories. While Israel has vaccinated some 125,000 Palestinian workers permitted to enter Israeli territory or settlements, health services in the occupied territories are forced to rely on vaccine donations from the WHO and from other countries – including the UAE and China, who have donated 60,000 doses of Sputnik V and 100,000 doses of Sinopharm respectively.

In the Middle East, as in the European Union, the regional vaccination drive will only be as effective as its weakest link. The UAE’s emerging status as a producer and distributor of vaccines will play an important role in addressing vaccine shortfalls across the region, but international partners – and especially European partners – also bear their share of responsibility for helping inoculate as many people as they can.

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EU Reporter publishes articles from a variety of outside sources which express a wide range of viewpoints. The positions taken in these articles are not necessarily those of EU Reporter.

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