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NOW IT’S only a matter of weeks before the shoulders are uncovered, the syringes are prepared, and the vaccines are injected. If last year was the one that gave COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) its name and 2020 was defined by masks, gowns and swabs, 2021 will be the year of the vial.
Being a pandemic (from the Greek word for “all people”), that welcome development presents all the usual problems of global differences in wealth, power and equity. Rich countries have already placed their orders. Poor countries can only hope not to be left out. What should be done?
The question not only takes advantage of the debate between nationalists and multilateralists that polarizes many western countries. It is also a timeless ethical enigma. In a famous Plato dialogue, an Athenian male named Callicles argues that justice is simply the law of nature, that is, of the strong. In our pandemic context: why I would not do it Do politicians in rich countries buy the vaccines and give their own constituencies herd immunity first?
Socrates, in that conversation, responds that justice requires cooperation and a vision that encompasses both the strong and the weak. Translated for Today: It’s better for the world to share vaccines because survival shouldn’t depend on where you live.
But this purely moral case is not the only one that can be made in favor of cooperation. Turns out multilateral vaccine trade would save many too additional lives.
A laboratory at Northeastern University in Boston has modeled two hypothetical scenarios of what would have happened if a vaccine had been available in March 2020. In one, the first two billion doses are purchased by rich countries, while only the thousand million remaining are allocated all others. In the second, the three billion are distributed from the beginning to all countries in proportion to their population.
In the first or “non-cooperative” case, the vaccine would have prevented 33% of worldwide deaths until September 1. In the second or “cooperative” scenario, you would have avoided 61%. That’s a lot of lives saved, even in countries that would have had the vaccine in any setting.
So the situation is a bit like the famous Prisoner’s Dilemma in game theory. If all countries cooperate, the world can achieve an optimal outcome and defeat the pandemic quickly and decisively. If they don’t cooperate, COVID-19 will drag on and there will be many more deaths. The dilemma is that each individual country also has an incentive to “cheat,” relying on others to share while taking all the doses they can. But this leaves others even worse off than if no one cooperated.
In game theory, the various outcomes can be modified by changing the mathematical parameters. And this, at least in my interpretation, is what the Eurasia Group, a geopolitical risk consultancy, is now trying to do with a new report commissioned by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The nonprofit organization is a lead sponsor of ACT-Accelerator, a collaborative effort between governments, businesses, scientists and philanthropists, to bring tests, treatments and, of course, vaccines to developing countries.
The idea is that rich donor countries get their hands on a pot to finance distribution in poorer nations. But donor nations have so far only contributed $ 5.1 billion. An additional $ 28.2 billion is needed to administer the injections and other tools as they become available. How can we get all the prisoners in this dilemma to cooperate?
By showing them that any money paid will give them great returns without any hassle, the Eurasia Group report implies. The group has analyzed the geopolitical and economic costs for rich countries if the pandemic were to last in poor ones. These include the obvious – the impact on the Japanese economy of the canceled Summer Olympics, say – and the obliques, such as the effects on international demand for German exports or American fracking gas.
Overall, the Eurasia Group found that the economic benefit of controlling the pandemic everywhere would be $ 153 billion next year for the top 10 donor countries, or $ 466 billion over the next five years. That’s more than 10 times the amount ACT-Accelerator asks for. Furthermore, if you compare ACT-A with the gigantic domestic stimulus programs that rich countries have passed, it begins to seem almost trivial.
Rich countries have many important decisions to make in the coming weeks: whether to approve which vaccine and how quickly, how to allocate the scarce vaccines in the national population, how to combat misinformation from anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, etc. These fights can get nasty, as I predicted in July.
But the decision to include poor countries in our common human fight against a pandemic should not be so difficult. If there is any good argument for not fully funding the ACT-Accelerator immediately, I haven’t seen it yet.
BLOOMBERG’S OPINION
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