Slow vaccine delivery risks global COVID-19 recovery

A jumbo jet carrying a palette of coronavirus vaccines landed last week in Rwanda, Sudan, Kenya, The Gambia, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There, the pilot took a happy masked photo with the Minister of Health and UN officials.

However, celebration opportunities have masked a more serious crisis, putting low- and middle-income countries even further behind than they were before the pandemic. As wealthy countries like the United States compete for herd immunity, vaccine deployments are painfully slowing in Africa and Southeast Asia amid concerns about case numbers in both regions.

The inequality caused by the coronavirus in the United States, where colored people suffer from both the health and economic implications of a pandemic a year ago, at a higher rate than whites, is the epitome of a global phenomenon. As low-income countries struggle to get vaccines, other countries are left behind as they reopen their economies, exacerbating the widest economic inequality to date.

“Ultimately, people will be free to travel and move around anywhere else, and Africans will not be able to move freely,” said a senior researcher at the Center for Global Development based in Washington, Liberia. Gyude Moore, Minister of Public Works, said. “We will see inequality reoccur in terms of who has access to the world.”

So far, World Health Organization officials and wealthy countries have promised African countries to be vaccinated with more than a billion COVID-19 vaccines. However, only 1.5 percent of those doses have been delivered. The African Export-Import Bank spends $ 2 billion on vaccines and is only one of the estimated $ 10 to $ 12 billion to vaccinate enough Africans to obtain immunity on the continent. It is a department.

At the current pace, Africa did not reach herd immunity until the end of 2023, or even 2024.

“Wealthy countries will be able to achieve significant and decisive levels of vaccination rates by the end of the summer or fall of 2021. There are several paths we are taking for poor countries. If we don’t make it, it will be after 2022. ONE Campaign President and Chief Executive Officer Gale Smith said, “We are at risk of not closing this as soon as possible. “

At least 72,000 Africans and 208,000 Southeast Asians have died in the coronavirus pandemic, according to World Health Organization statistics. Actual rates can be much higher, but both regions are far superior to the Americas and Europe.

Experts speculate that the combination of demographics and culture explains some of the positive news in both areas.

The population is generally younger than the hit countries. With a median of 20 years in Africa and an average resident of 38 years in the United States, the coronavirus gives worse results in older people than in younger people. Countries in Africa and Southeast Asia do not have a significant population in nursing homes, prisons, meat packaging factories, and other places where the virus is prevalent in Europe and the Americas.

Much of life in Africa and Southeast Asia also occurs outdoors, where the virus does not spread very quickly.

However, cases are increasing again after the surge of holidays when people in these areas return home from big cities to small villages and provide a myriad of new spread routes for the virus.

“The continent is definitely experiencing a second wave, which is much more deadly,” Moore said.

Public health experts warn that the spread of the virus anywhere in the world affects everyone else, even in countries where vaccines are widely accepted and administered. .. The more chances the coronavirus mutates, the more likely it is that the mutant will evolve to successfully evade the vaccine.

“It’s not safe here in the United States until everyone in the world is vaccinated,” said Rich Besser, a former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which currently runs the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “We can see mutations in the virus that disable our vaccine, disable treatment, and endanger people who have already been infected with Covid.”

Beyond the epidemiological obligation to control the spread of the virus, health experts say that wealthy countries have a moral imperative to support, which is not met by competition to protect their own people. I will.

Peter Hotez, director of national tropical medicine at Baylor University, said:

Wealthy countries have the opportunity to fix it and alleviate some of the suffering of low- and middle-income countries due to the success of several different vaccine candidates. The United States and the European Union have signed a contract to purchase far more vaccine doses than ultimately needed. This is an early bet on various candidates, assuming some will fail.

However, the success of multiple vaccines means that these wealthy countries have a surplus that they can share with non-wealthy countries.

“If I were the African government now, I would now contact the US government to see how many additional doses we could take,” Moore said. “They will pay far more supplies than they can use.”

A group of seven industrialized nations discussed a pandemic at a meeting last month, and the United States promised billions more to fund vaccines. The parliamentary coronavirus bailout package will add $ 11 billion for a global response, some of which will be sent to the global vaccine alliance, Gavi.

The United States is in talks with India, Japan and Australia over increased shipments to Asian countries, some of which counter China’s soft diplomacy in vaccine distribution in areas where both sides are vying for influence and control. Because. China ships its own vaccines to Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and other countries such as Africa and Latin America.

“A year later, there is still no global plan to end this pandemic in a timely manner,” Smith said. “We have some of the first songs that world leaders are preparing or starting to take some necessary steps.”