In late December, the West African nation of Guinea injected 25 of its senior officials with a dose of the Russian Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine. Leaving security concerns aside, national leaders went on state TV to celebrate.
“We’re guinea pigs,” said one.
About a month later, not a single dose of the licensed Western vaccine has yet been found on the African continent – about 60 million doses have been given worldwide.
This sharp discrepancy represents a long-feared outcome by public health experts. It also poses a formidable challenge to the global coalition, rubbing off vaccine doses for the world’s poorest nations.
“The cost of not resolving the problem of vaccine distribution internationally will be measured in life,” said Thomas Boliki, director of the Council on Foreign Relations’ global health program.
Even before the advent of the vaccine, the spread of the coronavirus has benefited rich nations in protecting critical resources such as hospital ventilators and personal protective devices for medical workers.
Equally dynamic vaccines have played in global races to collect doses.
According to Duke University’s Global Health Institute, a small group of rich countries with only 16 percent of the world’s population have cut off 60 percent of global vaccine supplies.
Canada has already pre-ordered enough potential doses to vaccinate its entire population about six times, and according to the organization, the U.S. is about to vaccinate every American about five times. Have enough options.
Vaccine doses have spread to the rest of the world.
Boliki said 1% of the world’s coronavirus cases are in Australia, Canada and Japan, but they have received higher doses than all of Latin America and the Caribbean, with about 20% of cases. Coronavirus mortality rates in Africa have risen to 2.5% this week, officials said. The rate is around 1.7%.
“What has happened here is that nations are determined to be more concerned about the reactions of their populations at home than what needs to be done to control the epidemic,” said Boliki, author of the book “Progress in the Paradox and the Paradox. ”
ड “. According to public health experts such as Larry Brilliant, these are serious consequences of “vaccine nationalism.”
Brilliant, a leading epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, said stockpiling vaccines by rich countries could accelerate the tragic boomerang effect.
“Staying at the front of the line ensures that everyone crosses the line,” said Brilliant, founder and CEO of Pendfence Advisory, a group of experts working to fight the Covid-1p epidemic.
Brilliant added, “No one is safe unless everyone in the world is safe.” “This is an epidemic. If a country is left unchecked, the disease will spread back and forth. And we will all be constantly surrounded by it. ”
COVAX was created precisely for that reason.
The coalition’s initial goal, which includes global health groups such as the World Health Organization and more than 190 countries, is to buy 2 billion doses by the end of 2021 to inoculate 20% of the population in 100 or more poor countries.
“This is the biggest logistical challenge we have not seen in global public health on such a large scale,” said Gyan Gandhi, UNICEF’s Kovacs co-ordinator, who is leading the group’s efforts to buy and deliver the vaccine.
The total cost is expected to reach said 1 billion, Gandhi said, but the coalition has only billion 1 billion in hand and has not received a single dose of the coronavirus vaccine, despite agreeing to protect 1.97 million doses.
COVAX, however, made additional progress this week.
The coalition on Friday announced the signing of an advance purchase agreement with Pfizer for 40 million doses of its vaccine. KV Vox also said he would use the option to receive his first 100 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
And earlier in the week, newly elected President J. Biden announced that the U.S. Will re-establish relations with the WHO and, contrary to the Trump administration’s policy, will join the Kovacs coalition.
But the coalition still lacks some of the billions of rupees needed to pull off its ambitious goal.
“It doesn’t have the funding and the resources it needs,” Brilliant said.
The Kovacs initiative was born as part of a history lesson – an attempt by the global community to prevent vaccines from monopolizing bilateral deals, which they did in 2009 with the swine flu vaccine.
The concept sounds like a fund pool, where members pay 20 percent of their vaccine to the central fund in exchange for enough vaccine.
For rich countries that are able to negotiate their own supply, the insurance comes in the form of insurance that the pre-ordered vaccine candidate is not approved by regulators. But for the world’s poorest countries, CVX is a lifeline – the only practical way to get a vaccine dose.
The distribution of Covex will run from the world’s largest humanitarian warehouse, a donation from the Danish government to UNICEF. The space is spread over three football fields, with everything from syringes to therapeutic food, soccer balls to water drilling rigs to more than a medium-energy building.
The supply box can travel anywhere from the Copenhagen hub to anywhere in the world within 72 hours. Once safe – will be shipped directly by vaccine manufacturers.
Since the richest countries in the world have been vaccinated, KVAX is arguing for the donation of practical doses of rich countries – the sooner, the better.
“If there are vaccines that are not used and saved for a rainy day, they should be donated, as more can be produced,” said Gandhi, head of UNICEF’s Market Shaping and Supplier Financing.
Both Canada and the European Union have said they are ready to donate additional vaccines, but nothing has been cemented. According to UNICEF, Kovacs has not received any donated vaccines.
Meanwhile, some nations that are struggling to get access to the vaccine, what Guinea is doing, have turned to less regulatory vaccines than China and Russia.
State-backed doses already take place in more than a dozen different middle-income countries, including Argentina, Mexico, Turkey, Brazil and Egypt.
“We have a challenge with KV Wax that, right now, is a charitable enterprise,” Boliki said. “At the end of the day, charity is seen by many politicians and national leaders as a secondary issue.”
“Unless we accept that it is in our best interests to make this initiative a success.” “We’re not going to look at the types and behaviors of national leaders’ investments, ”Boliki added.
Such an argument is purely economic. According to RN&, global GDP would shrink by about 300 300 billion a year, if only high-income countries could get vaccinated, especially the U.S. For a loss of 30 billion. But if high-income countries pay for the supply of vaccines, they will get back 4. 4.8 for every 1 1 they spend, policy research estimates non-profit.
There are also many secondary consequences if developing countries are left unsafe. If CoAX cannot vaccinate frontline healthcare workers in developing countries, it could disrupt long-running vaccination programs, leading to a resurgence of diseases such as measles and polio, which the world is close to eradicating, Gandhi said.
But the biggest consequence of unequal global vaccinations is a prolonged epidemic. Failure to vaccinate in Mali or Mozambique could mean a resurgence of the virus in the United States, putting children and large numbers of people at risk who cannot or will not be vaccinated, such as Immune Promise.
“No child and no individual is safe, as long as everyone is safe,” Gandhi said.
