People from poorer nations are unlikely to 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 found, as G7 leaders indicated a willingness to share your excess doses before a meeting on Friday.
“This huge vaccine surplus is the embodiment of vaccine nationalism, with countries prioritizing their own vaccination needs to the detriment of other countries and global recovery,” said ONE, a group campaigning against poverty.
The ONE policy team added that “a massive course correction” in distribution would be necessary if the world wanted to protect and save lives, as the death toll from the pandemic approaches 2.5 million.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that only 10 countries have so far administered 75% of all vaccines, describing them as “extremely irregular and unfair”.
Guterres said at least 130 countries have yet to receive a single dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.
“At this critical juncture, vaccine equity is the biggest moral test before the global community,” he said, adding that a meeting on Friday of the major industrialized nations of the G7 “could create the momentum” to address inequality.
‘Unprecedented inequality’
There are indications that the G7 is listening to the leaders of France, the United Kingdom and the United States, suggesting that they will make concessions on vaccines during the virtual meeting, which is being held in the United Kingdom.
French President Emmanuel Macron called on Europe and the United States to allocate between 3 and 5 percent of their vaccine supply to developing countries.
“It is an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it is politically unsustainable also because it is paving the way for a war of influence over vaccines,” Macron told the Financial Times in a video link interview on Thursday.
Macron said German Chancellor Angela Merkel also agreed that the decision to share part of Europe’s vaccine stock must be a joint effort.
Excessive doses of COVID-19 monopolized by rich countries would be sufficient to vaccinate the entire adult population in Africa, according to an analysis [Juan Mabromata/AFP]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he is also prepared to distribute hundreds of millions of spare doses of vaccines to the developing world, once all adults in the UK are inoculated.
The UK Times’ report said that up to 80 percent of excess doses will go to the global vaccine alliance, COVAX, which was created to distribute COVID-19 drugs to low-income nations.
The process is expected to start at least on March 1st.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden is expected to pledge $ 4 billion for the COVAX program.
According to the World Health Organization, the unit needs $ 5 billion this year alone to be able to distribute vaccines to at least the most vulnerable 20% of the population in poor countries.
The Biden administration did not say whether it would be willing to share its stock of COVID-19 vaccine. Currently, the United States has controlled 600 million doses of drug manufacturers, enough to cover its entire population under dual vaccine regimes.
The timetable for European and North American commitments remains unclear, leaving the possibility that many people around the world are still unable to receive the vaccine this year.
But, as the ONE study said, wealthy nations “will not do their citizens any favors” if they continue to accumulate vaccines.
“If the virus can thrive anywhere in the world, the risk of new variants increases and it is only a matter of time before strains appear that undermine the vaccines and tools that have been developed to combat COVID-19,” said the report.
Such concerns prompted Mexico to discuss the distribution at the UN Security Council earlier this week.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador said that his government would like the UN to address vaccine accumulation and equity, so that “all countries have the possibility to vaccinate their inhabitants”.
Russia and China have already started sending tens of thousands of doses of their COVID-19 vaccines to other developing and underdeveloped countries.
According to the COVID-19 tracker at Johns Hopkins University, more than 110 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 62 million have recovered.