Along with news that Britain has begun inoculating its health workers and vulnerable population against COVID-19 comes a warning that 90 percent of the people in poor nations could miss out on vaccinations against the disease because rich countries have hoarded far more doses than they need.
The warning comes from the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition including Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Global Justice Now, which observes that rich nations, home to only 14 percent of the world’s populations, have bought 53 percent of the total stock of the most promising vaccines as of last month.
While high-risk groups in Britain received on Tuesday the first shot of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech, most people in 67 low- and lower-middle-income countries including Bhutan, Ethiopia and Haiti risk being left behind, they said.
Among the three COVID-19 vaccines for which efficacy results have been announced, almost all the available doses of two of them — Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech — have been acquired by rich countries, the Alliance report said.
While AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford have pledged to provide 64 percent of their doses to people in developing nations, that would only reach at most 18 percent of the world’s population by next year, it added.
In the meantime, the European Union, the United States, Britain, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Hong Kong, Macau, New Zealand, Israel and Kuwait have acquired 53 percent of the potential doses—with Canada buying enough to vaccinate its population five times over, Oxfam said.
In an effort to address this kind of inequity, the World Health Organization (WHO) has thrown its support behind the COVAX alliance, which aims to have at least half a billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the first quarter of 2021 for distribution to 189 countries that have signed up for the program.
But such cooperation has not always been easy to achieve.
During the 2009 swine-flu outbreak, wealthy countries reserved huge numbers of vaccine doses for themselves, leaving low-income countries to rely on donations that would arrive much later. Today, these nationalist tendencies are evident in nations that have imposed export bans on face masks and ventilators.
Significantly, too, the United States and Russia are not members of the COVAX alliance. And even rich members of the alliance continue to cut their own deals with vaccine manufacturers, undermining the goal of equal distribution.
Writing in The Atlantic this month, Yasmeen Serhan notes that this go-it-alone approach doesn’t just hurt COVAX, it also risks perpetuating harm to public health and the global economy.
Recent modeling by Northeastern University, she writes, shows that a proportional distribution of vaccines could avert nearly twice as many deaths as a vaccine distribution limited to only high-income countries.
Further modeling conducted by the Rand Corporation concluded that inequitable vaccine distribution could cost the global economy up to $1.2 trillion in gross domestic product. Conversely, if low- and middle-income countries were granted equal access, Rand said, the cost to the global economy would be considerably less.
“A collective response … doesn’t just make moral sense—it makes scientific sense,” a spokesperson for the vaccine alliance Gavi, which leads COVAX. “If rich countries monopolize vaccines at the outset, it will take us a lot longer, and many more people will die, than if we distribute on a global, equitable basis.”
“If the pandemic has cast doubt on the ability of countries to implement a multilateral response to a global problem, that portends poorly for other shared crises—not least climate change,” Serhan writes. “Both challenges require unprecedented collaboration. Both disproportionately affect low-income communities. Neither can be averted by any single nation on the basis of wealth alone.”
President Duterte said as much when he recently addressed a special United Nations General Assembly meeting on COVID-19.
“If any country is excluded by reason of poverty or strategic unimportance, this gross injustice will haunt the world for a long time,” he said. “It will completely discredit the values upon which the United Nations was founded. We cannot let this happen. No one is safe unless everyone is safe.