You may have heard of “vaccine tourism,” the practice of traveling to other countries in order to obtain a vaccine—particularly a COVID-19 vaccine—more easily. This practice, however, is likely to do more harm than good insofar as pandemic management and public health are concerned. Not long after the COVID-19 vaccine rollout began in the United States and countries around the world, word started going around that some people were engaging in “vaccine tourism.”
Due to vaccine shortages in some areas, long waits for a vaccine to become available for a certain age group, or lack of trust in certain COVID-19 vaccines authorized locally, some people have considered the option of traveling to other countries or regions with higher vaccine availability or different vaccine roll-out rules in order to obtain their jab.
Some tourism agencies reportedly went as far as to offer vaccine tourism “packages” to those who were eager to get their dose sooner. The eagerness to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as soon as possible, is understandable. Health experts hail vaccines as the main means of bringing the COVID-19 pandemic to an end.
Moreover, the protection that the authorized vaccines offer against severe disease means that people can return to the workplace, school, and leisure travel with more confidence. However, vaccine tourism poses several ethical issues insofar as public health and vaccine equity are concerned.
Arthur Caplan, PhD, Drs. William F. and Virginia Connolly Mitty Professor of Bioethics at the Department of Population Health of the NYU Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, explains where the trouble with vaccine tourism lies.
Dr. Caplan points out “Everybody understands the desire to get vaccinated in the middle of a plague, if you’re going somewhere to get ahead [of the line], to get priority, then when you go to another country [to receive a COVID-19 vaccine] you’re taking it away, most likely, from somebody else.”
The speed of the vaccine roll-out has varied across the globe. While the United States, Canada, and many European countries have obtained sufficient doses of authorized COVID-19 vaccines to inoculate a significant percentage of their populations within the time frame they decided on, numerous other countries have been unable to purchase enough doses to do so.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the majority of COVID-19 vaccine distribution has occurred in only 10 high- and middle-income countries, meaning that the remaining countries face very limited access to vaccines. The unequal distribution of vaccines is an important public health issue, as without an equitable vaccination rollout, SARS-CoV-2 will likely continue to spread widely around the world.
