Combatting Hoarding: A Path Toward Global Vaccine Equity
By Sophie Naasz
This submission is part of a series by McGill students who were in the Fall 2024 course, Fundamentals of Global Health.
This drawing depicts the issue of vaccine hoarding. In the foreground, a child awaits vaccination. This child symbolizes the millions of people who desperately need vaccines but cannot access them due to hoarding by high-income countries (HICs). The back room represents the surplus of medicines HICs have and how they’ve refused to share their resources in the past and continue to do so today (“Let’s Not,” 2024). Two individuals within this back room have broken through the glass and helped the boy receive the vaccination. One of these individuals is a healthcare worker, and the other is a citizen. Both individuals represent possible advocates and show that support for vaccine distribution can arise from multiple avenues (Olsen & Shand, 2021).
My drawing focuses on the current mpox outbreak. Thus, red and blue represent a state of emergency, as the WHO declared the outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern” (World Health Organization, 2024). The child wears orange-red to represent being at risk, and the rest wear greenish clothes to represent health, prosperity, and new life. These individuals are showing a way forward for global solidarity.
The individual depicted on the left of the drawing represents acting as a healthcare role model and leverages their influence and medical expertise. The middle individual represents a global citizen who keeps themselves and others around them informed and advocates for change by calling on representatives to reflect global needs (“What it means”). The individual on the right supports by volunteering time, putting knowledge and skills into treating patients and administering vaccines (Dearden, 2024). The urgency of their actions is highlighted by the color scheme of the drawing, shifting from emergency colors in the back room on the left to green for the rest of the image — this shows that by embodying different types of advocacy, my generation can shift the current environment of isolationism into a movement that is focused on global solidarity.
References
Dearden, N. (2024, September 7). Mpox and the dangers of treating some lives as disposable. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/9/7/mpox-and-the-dangers-of-treating-some-live s-as
Let’s not repeat past deadly mistakes: Global Solidarity in MPOX Outbreak Now! Results Canada (2024, August 16). https://resultscanada.ca/lets-not-repeat-past-deadly-mistakes-global-solidarity-in-mpox-ou tbreak-now/
Olsen, B., & Shand, W. (2021, November 2). Canadian nurse. How you can be a better advocate for vaccines and public health. https://www.cna-aiic.ca/blogs/cn-content/2021/10/04/how-you-can-be-a-better-advocate-for-vaccines-and
What it means to be a global citizen. The Global Citizens’ Initiative. (n.d.). https://www.theglobalcitizensinitiative.org/what-it-means-to-be-a-global-citizen-2/
World Health Organization. (2024, August 14). Who director-general declares mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news/item/14-08-2024-who-director-general-declares-mpox-outbreaka-public-health-emergency-of-international-concern
Sophie Naasz
is a U3 student completing a BA&Sc in cognitive science and minoring in psychology. She is conducting her honours research at the Attention & Social Cognition Lab, where she is investigating how different types of face occlusions (religious, medical, or fashion) modulate occlusion effects and how they may relate to participants' cultural and social biases. I'm also involved in the McGill Pre-Law Society as an editor for the Undergraduate Law Review. Outside of her studies, she is a passionate writer, a casual hiker, and a weekend baker! This is her last semester of undergraduate education, but she is excited to head off to law school in the fall!