BY TAPIWA GOMO It is more than a year since the world ground to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last 12 months, there has been shifts and adjustments to measures to address the pandemic and the opening up of economies. This allowed production and livelihoods to resume and save the world from the potential devastating effects of the pandemic such as starvation and destitution. So far, this calculated and gradual easing of the COVID-19 preventive measures is proving useful and a reasonable balance between slowing down the spread while increasing production. However, the pendulum has massively swung towards vaccination, building on numerous assumptions. The most common assumption is that vaccines will improve people’s immunity against the coronavirus. For that reason, there are massive global campaigns to roll out vaccination, technically implying that everyone needs to be vaccinated. This is an ambitious project amid growing concerns that even after one receives a COVID-19 vaccine, they still should mask up and maintain physical distance as they can still be infected or infect others. Big money is now driving the campaigns and fast becoming the central magic bullet, suggesting that with money, vaccines will act like a gun firing preventive bullets to a helpless population. This is undermining the mere fact that the most effective and recommended preventive measures which include social distancing, wearing a face mask in public, ventilation and air-filtering, hand washing, covering one’s mouth when sneezing or coughing, disinfecting surfaces, and monitoring and self-isolation for people exposed or symptomatic require less money and are much more sustainable. In his column to the Project Syndicate, Jeffrey D Sachs, University Professor at Columbia University, wrote on April 6, 2021 that: “A new allocation of up to $650 billion worth of the International Monetary Fund’s reserve asset will ensure that governments in low-income and middle-income countries have the means to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and start on the path of investment-led recovery. We must seize this critical opportunity to co-operate effectively for the sake of humanity.” In Sachs’ postulation, this funding will support mass vaccination which is required to end the pandemic. Even when economies are starting to pick up with the easing of COVID-19 prevention restrictions, he insists that as long as “COVID-19 persists at high rates of transmission anywhere in the world, the pandemic will continue to disrupt global production, trade, and travel, and will also give rise to viral mutations that threaten to undermine previously acquired immunity from past infections and vaccinations.” While the risk remains, all indications are that the world has passed its worst compared with the same time last year. Sachs is a well-known expert on sustainable development, economic development, and the fight against poverty, but his approaches to addressing challenges such as poverty have been widely criticised for being neoliberal, Eurocentric and money-driven. Th