The gulf between developed and developing nations appeared to some to widen last week as reports emerged that the Ebola drug was being used to treat Westerners but not West Africans.
"What if it had killed both of them?" Paul Root Wolpe, director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta, said about the two Americans first treated with ZMapp. "It is only because it worked, seemingly very well, that people are screaming, 'How come people in Africa didn't get it?' "
Wolpe said that considering the converse situation could provide some perspective.
"If the first people (to receive doses of ZMapp) would have been Liberian, headlines would have screamed, 'Experimental drug tested on poor Africans,' " Wolpe said.
But the nagging question for some: Was giving the serum to Africans even a consideration? Should it have been?
"Why didn't Dr. Sheik Umar Khan, the chief Sierra Leone physician who died while treating Ebola patients, receive this medication?" Harriet Washington wrote in a recent CNN Opinion piece. "Because another method of determining who gets medications is at work here -- the drearily familiar stratification of access to a drug based on economic resources and being a Westerner rather than a resident of the global South."
possunt quia posse videntur