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The world is on the eve of a great scientific advance: in all probability a safe and effective vaccine against Covid-19 will be available early next year. In fact, there may be more than one. Thanks to this breakthrough, the world will finally have a chance to eradicate the threat of a pandemic and return to normal life.
Since it will be possible to vaccinate against the disease, governments will be able to revoke all social distancing measures, people will stop wearing the mask and the global economy will regain its momentum.
However, eradication of the disease will not happen automatically. To achieve this, It must be ensured that there is the real capacity to produce billions of doses of vaccine., find the financing to carry it out and identify the most appropriate strategies for its distribution.
Production capacity
Right now, most vaccine production is already destined for richer countries, who have signed agreements with pharmaceutical companies, guaranteeing the right to buy billions of doses as soon as they are produced.
But what about low- and middle-income countries? It is a group of countries that ranges from South Sudan to Nicaragua and Myanmar, which, despite being home to almost half of the world’s population, do not have enough purchasing power to enter into advantageous agreements with pharmaceutical companies. As it is, these countries they will be able to immunize, in the best of cases, only 14 percent of their population.
New prediction models developed by Northeastern University help us understand what happens if the distribution of vaccines is so uneven. The researchers analyzed two possible scenarios. In the first, vaccines are distributed to all countries depending on the number of inhabitants. In the second, we find a situation very close to what is happening these days, that is, the fifty richest countries on the planet will have the first two billion doses of the vaccine available. In this scenario, the virus will continue to spread uncontrollably for four months in three-quarters of the world. And we will see the number of victims double.
Would be one moral catastrophe. The vaccine makes Covid-19 a preventable disease, and no one has to die from a preventable disease simply because the country they live in cannot secure the necessary vaccine supplies. But regardless of moral principles, the scenario of a “vaccine reserved exclusively for rich countries” is no less problematic.
In this scenario, we would all become like Australia and New Zealand: two countries that have enjoyed long periods with very few cases of contagion within their borders, but that see their economies still penalized, because your trading partners are blocked. And every now and then, a new carrier of the virus will cross the South Pacific to create new foci of infection. These outbreaks tend to increase and expand, hence the need for new closures for schools and offices.
And despite his surplus of vaccines, even rich nations are at risk of being infected again, because not everyone will be willing to get vaccinated. The only way to eliminate the threat of this disease in one place is to eliminate it in all places. The best way to close this vaccination gap is certainly not to point the accusing finger at rich countries, which, understandably, are doing everything they can to protect their populations. Instead, it is necessary maximize capacity to produce the vaccine in many parts of the worldOnly then will we be able to protect everyone, in all corners of the planet.
Considerable progress has already been made on this front, especially with regard to medicines for the treatment of Covid-19. Pharmaceutical companies have agreed to increase production by pooling the use of plants. Remdesivir, for example, was created by Gilead, but Pfizer’s factories will produce additional quantities. No pharmaceutical company had allowed a competitor to use its facilities., while today we are witnessing this exceptional joint effort also with regard to vaccines.
In these hours, 16 pharmaceutical companies have signed an important agreement with our foundation, committing to collaborate in the production of the vaccine and to increase it at an unprecedented rate, thus ensuring that the approved vaccines can be distributed on a large scale as soon as possible.
The financing necessary for the production of vaccines.
In addition to supporting production capacity, it is necessary to finance the billions of doses of vaccines that will be allocated to the poorest countries. This is where Act Accelerator comes in, the initiative promoted by organizations like Gavi and the Global Fund. Although they are still unknown to many, these agencies have behind two decades of experience financing vaccines, drugs and diagnostic devices.
Pharmaceutical companies have worked to facilitate payments, forgoing any form of profit from Covid-19 vaccines and pledging to make them accessible to all. But public investment is also needed.
The UK is a good example for all rich nations: it has donated the necessary funds to the Accelerator to procure hundreds of millions of doses of vaccines for poor countries. Italian Prime Minister Conte was one of the first to recognize the need for a multilateral response to Covid-19, and with good reason. inserted the just and global response to the pandemic among the priorities of the Italian G20 agenda in 2021. But we have to do more and intervene more generously.
Vaccine distribution
Finally, once production capacity has been secured and funding has been found, health services must be strengthened to ensure the personnel and infrastructure capable of distributing vaccines to the world’s population.
We have much to learn from the ongoing efforts to eradicate polio. Among the most famous images from the polio campaign in India, there is one that shows a line of health workers, advancing holding heated containers for vaccines, submerged up to the belt in water, in flooded areas , to reach the most remote villages. A similar network of primary health care workers will be needed to identify Covid-19 cases in the poorest parts of the world., so that even the most inaccessible areas, where there are no roads, are reached. With the help of diagnostic devices, these operators will be able to sound the alarm, if another disease jumps species, from a bat – or another bird – to infect humans.
In other words, the battle to defeat Covid-19 will allow us to stand up. a system that could reduce the risk of new pandemics in the coming years.
As I studied their history, I learned that pandemics tend to create a very surprising dynamic between self-interest and altruism. Pandemics represent those rare cases in which a country’s knee-jerk reaction to save itself goes hand in hand with the urge to help others. And we find that self-interest and altruism, that is, ensuring access to vaccines even for poor nations, are one and the same.
(Translation by Rita Baldassarre)
September 30, 2020 (change September 30, 2020 | 07:18)
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