There is almost no COVID-19 vaccine
left in stock for poor countries after wealthy nations ordered for billions of
shots from the manufactures, World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
According to the WHO, Wealthy nations have snapped up several billion
vaccine doses and some countries have ordered enough shots to vaccinate their
populations more than once, while some countries in the developing world have
little or none.
When it comes to the coronavirus vaccine, there is
one question most people are asking - when will I get it? A handful of
countries have set very specific vaccination targets, but for the rest of the
world the picture is less clear.
Getting
the world vaccinated against Covid-19 is a matter of life and death, involving
complicated scientific processes, multinational corporations, government
promises and backroom deals. So figuring out when and how everyone in the world
will get the vaccine is not easy.
Reports
say that wealthy nations ordered “enough shots to vaccinate their populations
more than once” yet poor countries have not received enough or anything all.
In her article “What It Means When Billions of People Must Wait Years for a COVID
Vaccine” she says that developed countries will have access to
coronavirus shots first, and poorer ones will need to wait longer, possibly
until 2023 or even 2024.
“There will not be enough jabs
for everyone for a long time to come. Wealthier countries, which secured supply
deals early on, will get access to the vaccines first. However, phased roll-outs
and bumps in the road mean that their general populations should not expect a
shot before mid-2021, at best." She said.
Since then, the WHO has,
unfortunately, confirmed this bleak forecast. There is a very high
risk that the COVAX initiative, which aims to supply 92 low- and middle-income
countries with cheap coronavirus vaccines, will not deliver vaccines for
billions of people until 2024.
Many of
the findings seem to fall along predictable lines of rich v poor. The UK and
the US are both well supplied with vaccines right now because they could afford
to invest a lot of money into vaccine development and put themselves at the
front of the queue.
Rich
countries that didn't do that, like Canada or those in the EU bloc, are a
little further behind. Canada was criticized at the end of last year for buying
up five times the supply it needs to cover its population, but it seems it
wasn't positioned for priority delivery.
That's
partly because the country decided to invest in vaccines from European
factories, afraid that the US under Donald Trump would issue export bans. It
turned out to be a bad bet. European factories are struggling with supply and
recently it has been the EU, not the US that has been threatening export bans.
"As long as the European market doesn't have enough vaccines, I think that big imports to Canada are going to remain off the cards," says Ms Demarais. Most low-income countries haven't started vaccinating yet. But some countries in the middle are doing better than expected.
Serbia is eighth in the world in terms of the percentage of its population vaccinated, ahead of any country in the EU.
Its success is partly down to an efficient roll-out but it's also benefiting from vaccine diplomacy - a battle between Russia and China for influence in Eastern Europe. It's one of the few places where the Russian vaccine Sputnik V and the Chinese vaccine SinoPharm are already available.
On paper, Serbians are given a choice of what vaccine they would prefer - Pfizer, Sputnik or SinoPharm. In reality, most people end up being given SinoPharm.
And the influence China is exerting here is likely to be long-term. Countries giving a first and second dose of one of the Chinese vaccines are also likely to look to Beijing for booster doses if needed.
The United Arab Emirates is also relying heavily on the SinoPharm vaccine - it makes up 80% of the doses being administered there right now. And the UAE is building a SinoPharm production facility.
According to Ms Demarais, some countries may not get widespread coverage even by 2023. Some may never be fully covered. Vaccination may not be a priority for every country, especially one that has a young population and is not seeing huge numbers of people getting sick.
The problem with that scenario is as long as the virus can prosper somewhere it will be able to mutate and migrate. Vaccine-resistant variants will continue to evolve.
It's not all bad news. Vaccines are being produced faster than ever but the scale of the task - inoculating 7.8 billion people around the world - is gigantic. And it's never been attempted before.
President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, criticized the behaviour of rich countries and described it as a double standard.
“This is hypocrisy and double standards we have always talked about,” he said on Tuesday evening after WHO Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed concerns that rich nations are undermining efforts to deal with the pandemic.
Tedros underlined the importance of using every opportunity to step up vaccine production “because, with increased production, the pie is increased, then there is a better volume to share”.
“Otherwise, with shortages, sharing is difficult,” he said. “And that’s exactly what’s happening now.”
Manufacturers had signed a deal with the UN under a US$7.5 billion program funded by the G7 to extend jabs to vulnerable communities in the spirit of “affordable and equitable access to vaccines” and treatments for COVID-19.
However, it turns out, wealth
nations, not yet mentioned, have purchased almost all the available vaccines in
stock, and are hording the shots while the test of the world remain exposed to
the virus.
Dr. Tedros has continues to rally
world leaders to check their moral compass and insisted that the world faces a
“catastrophic moral failure” if COVID-19 vaccines are not distributed fairly.”
United States President Joe Biden
said on Tuesday that the country will have around 600 million doses of Covid-19
vaccine by end of July, enough to inoculate all Americans.
"By the end of July we'll have 600 million doses, enough to vaccinate every American," said Biden at a CNN town hall meeting. - Africa
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