Time to end chasm between vaccine-rich and vaccine-poor

AS temperatures cool in the West with another difficult autumn and winter pandemic season potentially ahead, the debate is hotting up over global vaccines distribution with many developing countries still having very low inoculation rates.

US President Joe Biden will urge world leaders early next week at the United Nations (UN) to commit to vaccinating 70 per cent of the world's population within a year, but that lofty goal remains a pipe dream for now. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown, now a UN official, turbocharged the issue too last week, rightly asserting that scarcity of vaccines in poor countries is not just a moral failure, but also could come back to haunt the West given the prospect of new mutant variants of the virus emerging.

With some 70 per cent of the West now vaccinated, the counterpart figure in Africa is only 2 per cent. Yet, many hundreds of millions of doses are still lying in warehouses in Europe and North America when they could be used in developing countries.

It is not just politicians, however, that are highlighting the challenge. On Sept 10, Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group which developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, said the world needed to "turn the tap on" to fight the "fire" of coronavirus internationally.

It is not just that the West had a moral obligation to help vaccinate other countries, but as his colleagueSarah Gilbert argued too, booster third jabs in the West should only be given to the elderly and people with weakened immune systems. This intervention is important coming amid rows in many Western countries over whether there should be a mass roll-out of booster jabs, and on whether first and second doses should also be given to children as young as 12.

So, just as many hoped that vaccine shortages in the developing world would be eased, plans to offer mass booster programmes mean that a lot more vaccines have to be sourced and put in store in the West. This extends the time that will be needed to enable the rest of the world to catch up, meaning many thousands (even tens of thousands) of people will die.

Failure to act is not only critical in addressing the global healthcare emergency. Education in a quarter of countries is at risk of collapse due to the pandemic's impact, as a Save The Children study last week warned. The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread with the UN estimating that, for the first time in history, about 1.5 billion children were out of school during the pandemic, with at least a third unable to access remote learning.

Save the Children found eight countries to have school systems at "extreme risk", with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria and Somalia deemed most vulnerable, and Afghanistan following closely behind. It found that a further 40 countries, including Yemen, Burkina Faso, India, the Philippines and Bangladesh, are all at "high risk".

As much of the developing world faces a combination of interrelated crises including extreme poverty, the Covid crisis, climate breakdown and inter-communal violence, there are growing fears for a "lost generation of learners". This contains the seeds of other future potential crises, including political and economic unrest in the years to come.

There is also a compelling economic case too for ending the global vaccine chasm. In June, the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank Group, jointly with the World Health Organization (WHO), and World Trade Organization, issued an extraordinary call for more financing actions by government leaders to accelerate the end of the pandemic.

FALLING SHORT OF COMMITMENT

They collectively called for US$50 billion of investment to generate US$9 trillion in global economic returns by 2025 and boost manufacturing capacity, supply, trade flows and the equitable distribution of diagnostics, oxygen, treatments, medical supplies and vaccines. In so doing, they argue, the ambition of the WHO to vaccinate some 30 per cent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 could be boosted to 40 per cent, and at least 60 per cent by the first half of 2022.

To be sure, some movement is being made on this agenda. The G-7 leaders committed in June, for instance, to provide one billion vaccine doses for low and lower-middle income countries over the next year, but the WHO says this falls far short of the 11 billion vaccine doses needed.

While welcoming the donations of vaccines, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said, "Many countries are now facing a surge in cases, and they are facing it without vaccines. We are in the race of our lives, but it's not a fair race, and most countries have barely left the starting line."

Mr Brown said that the G-7 summit would be remembered "only for a colossal failure to honour UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson's promise to vaccinate the world". Meanwhile, Max Lawson of the charity Oxfam said, "Never in the history of the G-7 has there been a bigger gap between their actions and the needs of the world."

With the United Kingdom playing a world leadership role in 2021, not just with its presidency of the G-7 but also its hosting of the COP26 climate summit, London should be setting an international example on this agenda given that so much of the UK population has already been vaccinated. To translate this to the global picture, the UK has given almost as many doses to its own citizens as the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access (Covax) programme has been able to ship to 120 countries in dire need of jabs.

UK Cabinet ministers insist London can help to jab the world while delivering a domestic booster programme. They note that the United Kingdom is committed to providing 100 million jabs internationally by 2022, having already delivered nine million.

Positive as these commitments are, however, the UK government must do more. The impact of creating what is in effect a sterilised wedge from the rest of the world is not just unjust, but also potentially self-defeating, given the possibility of vaccine-busting variants arising.

At the 18-month point of the pandemic, there is a need for an increasingly global response to the continuing challenge it poses. The more policymakers act on a key lesson of the crisis: that no one is safe until everyone is safe, the faster the crisis may pass and the world moves into the "new normal" that comes next.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.