My Family’s Global Vaccine Journey

We were spread across three continents, at the mercy of vaccine geopolitics. Which of us would be inoculated last?

In early February, my sister posted a video in our family’s WhatsApp group. It was a seven-minute CNN report on Malawi, a country in East Africa that is one of the world’s poorest. Coronavirus vaccines were nowhere to be found in Malawi, the report said, because richer countries were hogging the supplies. The video focused on Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre, Malawi’s second-largest city, showing the strain the facility was under as it battled the virus. The hospital’s workers were tending to infected patients but had little prospect of getting vaccinated soon. My sister Pui-Ying, a pediatrician, was one of those unprotected workers.