One crucial insight emerging from the quarrel over Covid-19 vaccine delivery is that every human life is of infinite worth. Being made in the image of God, all are of exactly equal value. It is futile therefore to weigh against each other the merits of saving a hundred lives in Madrid against the same in Munich or Manchester, or indeed Mogadishu. Morally there is no difference. Trying to divert scarce vaccine supplies from one destination to another is, from this perspective, a wasted and somewhat unseemly exercise, adding nothing to the common good.
To its credit, the British government has grasped this, while some of the member states of the European Union, and the EU Commission itself, have yet to do so. Not for the first time the coronavirus pandemic has brought with it an important moral lesson. Vaccine nationalism is a dead end. It is very much in the British national interest – indeed in every nation’s interests – to stamp out Covid-19 wherever it occurs. Thus the urgent shipments to South Africa of large quantities of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, made in Britain, make perfect sense.
04 February 2021, The Tablet
Vaccine battles damage us all
Covid-19 pandemic
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