By Cristina Cotofana
A year since the emergence of the new coronavirus in December 2019, several vaccines have now been rolled out. Given the scope of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the questions as to who will gain access to the vaccine and when are matters of concern for all. The World Health Organization (WHO) has launched a program to ensure fair access to vaccines worldwide. Yet, there are some who say that this process is being hindered to some extent due to the deals struck by rich nations directly with vaccine manufacturers. This leaves experts fearing that the phenomenon, known as ‘vaccine nationalism’, might prolong the pandemic.
Global vaccine program
WHO has put the COVAX plan into place to ensure that countries around the world have fair access to vaccines. COVAX is a program that aims to purchase and deliver safe, effective, and approved vaccines for fair distribution around the world with the ultimate goals of ending the acute phase of the pandemic and beginning the rebuilding of economies. COVAX intends to deliver two billion doses by the end of 2021 which should be enough to protect those people at high risk as well as healthcare and other frontline workers.
COVAX is funded by governments, vaccine manufacturers, other organizations, and individuals with US$2.4bn having been committed by late 2020. This program is designed to pool funds from wealthy nations and non-profit entities to buy vaccines through COVAX and supply these to the participating states.
By the end of 2020, 190 economies had joined the COVAX Facility including 98 higher-income economies and 92 low- and middle-income economies.
“By pooling financial and scientific resources, these participating economies will be able to insure themselves against the failure of any individual vaccine candidate and secure successful vaccines in a cost-effective, targeted way,” WHO explained in a news release.
COVAX offers:
Rich countries’ bilateral vaccine deals
In addition to funding COVAX, wealthy developed nations have also entered into pre-purchase bilateral deals with vaccine manufacturers in an attempt to secure vaccines for their populations in a process known as “vaccine nationalism”.
With this mechanism in place, many manufacturers have been observed prioritizing the approval of vaccines for rich countries. This move risks severely limiting available supplies for low-and middle-income countries.
“This could delay COVAX deliveries and create exactly the scenario COVAX was designed to avoid, with hoarding, a chaotic market, an uncoordinated response, and continued social and economic disruption”, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO chief, said.
Vaccine nationalism to prolong pandemic
Given the high virulence and transmissibility rates of coronavirus, an uneven distribution of vaccines is hardly likely to put an end to the pandemic any time soon.
Commenting on this matter, Seth Berkley, CEO of GAVI, the body leading the procurement and delivery for COVAX, explained: “If you were to try to vaccinate the entire US, and the entire EU, for example, with two doses of vaccine – then you’d get to about 1.7 billion doses. And if that is the number of doses that’s available, there’s not a lot left for others. If a handful or even 30 or 40 countries have vaccines, but more than 150 others don’t, then the epidemic will rage there.”
For his part, Ghebreyesus called for “preventing vaccine nationalism” saying that “sharing finite supplies strategically and globally is actually in each country’s national interest.” Achieving this also has the benefit of increasing the availability of vaccines and reducing unused doses due to a decreasing misalignment between demand and the availability of vaccines.
“We call on these countries to give much greater priority to COVAX’s place in the queue and to share their own doses with COVAX, especially once they have vaccinated their own health workers and older populations so that other countries can do the same,” he said.
Apart from vaccine nationalism and the risks this involves, there are a number of other issues that have as yet to be addressed: the existence of different vaccines, how long immunity lasts, can vaccinated people still spread the virus, privacy of data, proper authentication and ensuring security being amongst the most important ones. In addition, with richer countries having already rolled out their vaccination programs and poorer countries still waiting to start, there is the bigger political issue of respecting the rights of unvaccinated people who might be barred from accessing certain services.
