‘It is disheartening to see ‘vaccine nationalism’ eclipse the hope around the development of the vaccine. The rich countries, with 13% of the world’s population, have already secured 3.4 billion doses of the potential vaccines; the rest of the world has pre-committed vaccine orders of 2.4 billion doses. The poorest countries, with a population of 700 million people, have no agreements for the vaccine. They depend on the Covax vaccine, developed in partnership between the World Health Organization, the Vaccine Alliance (GAVI), and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). Covax has agreements to secure about 500 million doses, which would be enough to vaccinate 250 million people and cover about 20% of the populations of the poorest countries. In contrast, the United States of America, by itself, has made agreements to purchase enough doses to cover 230% of its population and could eventually control 1.8 billion doses (about a quarter of the world’s near-term supply).
‘The way things are going, two-thirds of the world’s population will not have a vaccine before the end of 2022... The struggle between ‘vaccine nationalism’ and the ‘people’s vaccine’ mirrors the fight between the North and the South over questions of debt and over vast areas of human development... Precious resources need to go toward testing, tracing, and isolation to break the chain of infection of the virus; they need to go toward building up the public health infrastructure, including training health care professionals who would need to give the two-dose injection to billions of people; they need to be used for the building of regional pharmaceutical production; and certainly they need to go toward the immediate relief for people, including income support, food provision, and social protection against the shadow pandemic of patriarchal violence.’
Read here (The Bullet, Dec 4, 2020)
