By Niresh Eliatamby and Dr. Nicholas Ruwan Dias
“All men are created equal under God.”
– Thomas Jefferson in the US Declaration of Independence (1776)
“It’s all about the money.”
– Swedish singer Meja (1998)
More than 74% of third-class passengers on the Titanic died, while only 38% of first-class passengers were lost. Imagine third-class passengers begging for their lives as first-class snobs sailed away in half-filled lifeboats while the band kept playing on the doomed luxury liner.
Billions in the developing world are in the Titanic’s third class right now, watching many developed-world governments hoarding Covid vaccines, knowing this would probably lead to hundreds of thousands of – if not millions – deaths in the developing world during 2021 and 2022. The rich nations are the first class who can afford to pay for their safety.
Sri Lanka is one of 67 poor nations identified as likely to be among the last on the list of countries that would receive sufficient quantities of the vaccine.
Economic genocide
How is this not genocide? Or at least indirectly but knowingly causing genocide?
The world has not seen a genocide of massive proportions since Cambodia in 1975-79 where up to three million people died. During the half-century since then, genocides have mercifully been limited to the hundreds of thousands killed as in Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur. If it happens, a Covid vaccine genocide would be a rare genocidal event in the 21st Century.
The only notable genocide in this millennium has been the 2003 Darfur genocide in Sudan, where approximately 400,000 people have been killed in attacks by pro-government forces at war with separatist rebels. But chances are we will witness one next year, in which over a million could die. After all, 1.6 million are already dead in less than a year, and the daily global death rate is at an all-time high of almost 13,000.
But the world is standing around, watching the rich nations snap up the precious stocks of vaccines (Fig. 1).
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Fig. 1[/caption]
Akin to the Bengal famine genocide
If you think genocide is associated only with violence, think again. Wars without violence are not new – neither are massacres. The 1943 Bengal famine saw up to three million die due to the denial of food to millions of Indians by the British rulers’ wartime policies. Many scholars have classified the Bengal famine as genocide.
Other economic genocides
There have been other economic genocides before on smaller scales, mainly where economic sanctions by rich and powerful nations against poorer nations have led to malnutrition, disease, and deaths among civilian populations, but nothing in recent times on the scale that we are likely to witness in 2021.
Undeniable facts
Global health authorities and pharmaceutical companies have estimated that for a nation’s population to develop a minimum level of immunity to Covid, at least 70% of the population needs to be vaccinated. But look at the undeniable facts that have been presented by the World Health Organisation (WHO), Amnesty International, Oxfam, and many other responsible global organisations:
Watching another Rwanda happening
The genocide that was most widely publicised as it happened was Rwanda in 1994, where modern communication methods provided full details as it unfolded. But the world stood by as 800,000 people were butchered, one of the greatest failures of the UN and the global powers. Is another Rwanda happening in front of our eyes with the hoarding of the Covid vaccines?
It’s time the world takes concrete steps to prevent a global humanitarian disaster. Let’s stop behaving as though we’re the band members on the Titanic.
© Niresh Eliatamby and Nicholas Ruwan Dias.
(Dr. Nicholas Ruwan Dias [BSc, MSc, PhD] and Niresh Eliatamby [LLB, LLM, MBA] are Managing Partners of Cogitaro.com, a consultancy that finds practical solutions for challenges facing society, the environment, and all types of industries.
Dr. Dias is a digital architect and educationist based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. ruwan@cogitaro.com.
Eliatamby is an author, journalist, and educationist based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. niresh@cogitaro.com)

- Global production of Covid vaccines in 2021 is estimated at around five billion doses, which is enough for about 2.5 billion people. There are eight billion people on this planet
- Many developed nations are hoarding stockpiles of vaccines by prepaying, which developing nations can’t afford to do
- Several developed nations have reneged on their commitment for equitable global distribution of the vaccines, agreed upon by 184 nations in the WHO COVAX facility that was set up to equitably distribute Covid vaccines
- Of the 193 member states of the United Nations (UN), as many as 67 will receive only negligible numbers of vaccine doses in 2021, to vaccinate perhaps a meagre 10% of their populations
- Developed nations are blocking pleas by developing nations to allow the world’s poor access to vaccine technology so that global production can be increased quickly
- Developed nations are also blocking calls from poorer nations to waive intellectual property rights guaranteed by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to Covid vaccines, which currently make it illegal for anyone but the vaccine owners to produce doses
- Many developing countries will suffer the terrors of Covid well into 2022 and 2023, while developed states are expecting to get back to normalcy by the end of 2021
- The delay in the distribution of the vaccines to the developing world will further exacerbate the gap between the world’s rich and poor
