No COVID-19 vaccine in stock as poor and rich countries fight for the shots

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.

Agathe Demarais (pictured) is the Director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has done some of the most comprehensive research on the topic has looked at the world's production capacity, along with the healthcare facilities needed to get vaccines into people's arms, the number of people a country has to contend with, and what they can afford.

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