People from poorer countries probably won’t be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine this year because the world’s richest countries have bought a billion more doses than their citizens need, a new study finds, as G7 leaders were willing to take their excess doses to share. prior to a meeting on Friday.
“This massive vaccine surplus is the epitome of vaccine nationalism, with countries prioritizing their own vaccination needs at the expense of other countries and global recovery,” said ONE, a group campaigning against poverty.
ONE’s policy team added that “a massive course correction” in distribution was needed if the world was to protect and save lives as the pandemic death toll approaches 2.5 million.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that only 10 countries had administered 75 percent of all vaccinations so far, describing it as “vastly unequal and unfair”.
Guterres said at least 130 countries have not yet received a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
“At this critical moment, vaccine equality is the greatest moral test for the world community,” he said, adding that a meeting later Friday of the G7 industrialized nations could “create the momentum” to tackle inequality.
‘Unprecedented inequality’
Evidence suggests that the G7 is listening with leaders from France, the UK and the United States who are all suggesting that they will make concessions on vaccines at the virtual meeting hosted by the UK.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on Europe and the United States to spend between 3 and 5 percent of their vaccine supplies on developing countries.
“It is an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it is also politically unsustainable as it paves the way for a war affecting vaccines,” Macron told the Financial Times newspaper in a video link on Thursday.
Macron said German Chancellor Angela Merkel has also agreed that the decision to share some of Europe’s vaccine stock should be a concerted effort.
The excess COVID-19 doses cornered only by wealthy countries would, according to one analysis, be enough to vaccinate the entire adult population of Africa. [Juan Mabromata/AFP]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he was also willing to give away hundreds of millions of spare vaccine doses to developing countries once all adults in the UK have been vaccinated.
The report in the British Times newspaper said that up to 80 percent of the excess doses will go to the global vaccine alliance COVAX, which was set up to distribute COVID-19 drugs to lower-income countries.
The trial is expected to start on March 1 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden is expected to pledge $ 4 billion to the COVAX program.
According to the World Health Organization, the facility will need $ 5 billion this year alone to distribute vaccines to at least the most vulnerable 20 percent of the population in poor countries.
The Biden administration has not disclosed whether it would be willing to share its supply of COVID-19 vaccines. Currently, the US has cornered 600 million doses from the drug manufacturers, enough to cover the entire population under the two-shot vaccine regimens.
The timeline of the pledges from Europe and the US remains unclear, leaving the possibility that many people around the world would still not be able to get the vaccine this year.
But, as the ONE study said, wealthy countries “won’t do any favors to their own citizens” if they keep hoarding the vaccines.
“If the virus can thrive around the world, the risk of new variants increases and it is only a matter of time before strains emerge that undermine the vaccines and tools developed to combat COVID-19,” said the report. .
Such concerns brought Mexico to the issue of distribution to the UN Security Council earlier this week.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his administration would like the UN to tackle vaccine hoarding and equality so that “all countries have the option to vaccinate their residents.”
Russia and China have already started shipping tens of thousands of doses of their COVID-19 vaccines to other developing and underdeveloped countries.
According to Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 tracker, more than 110 million people around the world have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 62 million have recovered.