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PARIS: The development of new Covid-19 vaccines will not succeed in ending the pandemic unless all countries receive doses quickly and fairly, disease experts warned Saturday.
As several nations consider implementing vaccine passports when international travel resumes, the authors of an open letter published in the Lancet medical journal said that stockpiling vaccines in wealthier countries would only prolong the global health emergency.
They warned that “vaccine nationalism” could leave the Covax initiative aimed at bringing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries facing huge dose deficits for years to come.
“The harsh reality is that the world now needs more doses of Covid-19 vaccines than any other vaccine in history to immunize enough people to achieve global immunity to the vaccine,” said lead author Olivier Wouters of the London School of Economics and Political Science. .
“Unless vaccines are distributed more equitably, it could be years before the coronavirus is brought under control globally.”
Despite the fact that there are more than two dozen Covid-19 vaccines in development or approved for use, low-income countries still have enormous logistical challenges in obtaining immunizations and delivering them to populations.
These include a lack of funds to purchase vaccines, as well as a poor infrastructure to transport and store them, especially since mRNA vaccines on the market currently need to be kept ultra-cold during delivery.
And despite unprecedented public and private investment in vaccine development and procurement, Covax estimates it will need an additional $ 6.8 billion in 2021 to secure supplies for 92 developing countries.
Based on available sales figures, the authors said that wealthy nations representing 16 percent of the world’s population had already obtained 70 percent of vaccine doses, enough to inoculate each of their own citizens multiple times. .
“Securing large quantities of vaccines in this way is equivalent to countries putting widespread vaccination of their own populations before vaccinating health care workers and high-risk populations in poorer countries,” said co-author Mark Jit. from the London School of Hygiene. and Tropical Medicine.
The letter called on manufacturers to accelerate technology transfer to developing countries to help them produce doses domestically, as well as price controls for what it called “prohibitively expensive” vaccines currently on the market.
The authors said that vaccines developed by China, India and Russia, once licensed by the World Health Organization, could be of great help to poorer nations as their supply and storage were simpler than American alternatives / European. – AFP
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