In the last 50 years, vaccination has averted 154 million deaths, 146 million kids under 5 years, and 101 million infants, according to this World Health Organisation report. They translate that to over 10 billion years of health gained and 52% of those child lives were in Africa, since the Expanded Programme on Immunization began in May of 1974.

It is a shame Europe wants to block Africa from the same health benefits in agriculture.

Lives saved are obviously important but so is quality of life. Throughout history, when a people devotes less of their time and money to basic necessities like food and energy, culture flourishes. Life improves. In the US, we witnessed it in real time when the Tennessee Valley Authority brought affordable energy to local people. They soon had electricity for irrigation which made food afforable. Health improved, schools sprang up, and the one thing that prevents that from happening in Africa is European obstructionism. 


Image credit to The Conversation/Dong Jianghui/Xinhua/Getty Images

Environmental groups there are funded by governments, not people, so even if some anti-science conspiracy theorist at Swiss Public Eye thinks they are underpaid, they are paid 100X what people in Sub-Saharan Africa earn each year.

Science could be the great equalizer but Europe threatens African nations with embargos if they use any science that isn't from a European company like BASF. Mutagenesis is fine, it is somehow even labeled organic despite being manufactured in a lab using radiation and chemical baths, but GMOs are bad, even though GMOs are far more precise and safer genetic engineering than Mutagenesis.

Europe says for Africa to win, science must lose, but most of Africa is not the natural breadbasket that France is, nor can they afford to import organic food (predominantly from Russia, until Europe tried to rhetorically defend Ukraine, and likely fake labels anyway) - Africa needs help from technology.

Which means Europe must learn to love brown and black people more than they hate science. WHO is touting the benefits of vaccines, and rightly so, but their efforts to promote food security, rather than white elites giving charity, have fallen short.