Gasping for air

The US is home to over 4 million Indian Americans. We’re a diverse population, but overall we’re the most affluent of all Asian American subgroups, with a median income of $119,000 in 2019. That’s in stark contrast to the paltry average income in India itself, which is barely $5,000 a year.

Indian Americans are now trying to use this privilege to help those back in India – a country of over 1.3 billion people.

Members of our community are mobilizing to purchase oxygen tanks, set up GoFundMe pages, and organize fundraising campaigns like ‘Help India Breathe’ to support pandemic relief in India. Many of us are also supporting nonprofits like theAssociation for India's Development, GiveIndia, and Sewa International.

These efforts will help save lives, but they’re also a bit like putting Band Aids on bullet wounds. We also need to embrace advocacy – especially around vaccine equity.

The US has a strong grip on Covid-19 vaccine intellectual property, making it challenging for developing countries to produce or purchase less expensive generic versions. In India, just 2 percent of the population is fully vaccinated.

Under pressure from global health advocates, the Biden administration recently announced that it would support a waiver on intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines to accelerate global production of the vaccine. That's good news.

But we can't simply wait for developing countries to produce their own vaccines. We need to push wealthy countries, which have purchased the vast majority of the world's existing vaccine supply, to donate their surplus doses to countries in need.

By July, the US is expected to have a surplus of 300 million or more vaccine doses. Whatever we don't need here should go to international organizations like COVAX, which can distribute them to developing countries like India that desperately need to increase their vaccination rates.

This isn’t just the right thing to do – it will also help protect people in the United States. The further the virus spreads globally, the more variants we see, which can make the vaccines we rely on less effective. No country will be free from Covid-19 as long as any country is still fighting it.

The pandemic has highlighted how interconnected the world is. As my own family’s tragedies have made all too clear, viruses know no borders – and neither do death, grief, and mourning. Life-saving vaccines shouldn’t either.

Excerpted: ‘Viruses Don’t Recognize Borders and Neither Should Vaccines’

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