Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the world has been struck by a tremendous crisis affecting not only public health and economy but also international relationships. As the vaccination campaigns progress, the risk of nationalist moves increases, potentially resulting in worsening the already existing inequalities between high-income countries and middle- and low-income ones. Global cooperation is hence crucial.
Covid-19: global problems require global solutions
The Covid-19 pandemic the entire world has been facing is contributing to reshaping not only public health approaches on a global level but also economic and political balances (Masetti, 2020) and it is causing a tremendous crisis on all fronts whose effects are probably going to be long-lasting. The long (and yet uncertain) duration of the restrictive measures that the governments around the world have been compelled to take in order to limit the spread of the pandemic makes it even more difficult to make exact predictions about its economic consequences and their scope. Moreover, the pandemic still raging is also influencing the international balances and relationships and geopolitical strategies. The Covid-19 crisis, in fact, has shown (and currently is), on the one hand, how difficult international cooperation can be, on the other, how essential it is to overcome the problems posed by the pandemic. Both the pandemic itself and the resulting socio-economic crisis are global problems and, as such, they can be effectively solved only by global cooperation. Otherwise, if each government acts in complete disregard of the others, the result will be chaos and a deepening crisis, which is already severe in its current state (Harari, 2020).
The interests at stake are of vital importance: the decisions that will be taken in the next few months will probably shape the world for years to come, not just our healthcare systems but also our economy, politics and international relationships.
Vaccines and global cooperation
Developing, perfecting and distributing vaccines against COVID-19 are probably the most pressing challenges at the moment. The extraordinarily rapid development of different types of vaccines was no mean feat to do considering that no vaccines in history had been developed within such a short time. In addition to the urgency to stop the spread of the pandemic, it was probably the competition to foster the research and to lead to such an endeavour, primarily of scientific progress.
Undoubtedly, the impact of vaccines exceeds their ability to prevent global infectious diseases, since they play a crucial (more or less indirect) role also in economy and international relationships (Hotez, 2020). Whoever firstly succeeds in completing vaccination will be probably the first to get the pandemic under control, to overcome the downside of the restrictions, to prevent or at least reduce the economic losses. The problem is, however, that nobody actually wins until everyone does. If we truly want to succeed and mitigate the pandemic impact on public health and the economy, we need every country to be given the chance to do it. In other words, global equitable access to a vaccine is essential.
Vaccines distribution and inequalities
In an email response, WHO told Anadolu Agency that «It’s not the vaccines that will stop the pandemic; it’s the vaccination». Ensuring fair and equitable access to the vaccines will hence be «like climbing the Everest», a formidable challenge (Altug, 2021).
The risk is in fact that billions of people in low- and middle-income countries will be left out from any access to vaccines, as Oxfam and other international organizations (such as those of the People’s Vaccine Alliance) fear (BBC, 2020). To the current state, wealthy nations, representing about 14% of the world’s population, have already bought more than half of the promised doses of the main COVID-19 vaccines. Moreover, while about 39 million doses (and counting, as the vaccination continues) have been administered in 49 higher-income countries, only 25 doses have been distributed in one of the lowest-income countries, Guinea (Safi, 2021).
According to WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, «the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure», whose price will be paid at the expense of the lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries. (Ghebreyesus, 2021)
COVAX: a step towards equitable vaccination?
An important and ambitious initiative aimed at ensuring global equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines is the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX), launched in April 2020 and jointly led by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI). It is one of the four pillars (WHO, 2020) which the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator is made of and it is aimed particularly at both supporting the development and manufacture of COVID-19 vaccines and guaranteeing fair and equitable access to them for every country in the world (Gavi, 2020).
All participating countries, regardless of income levels, will have equal access to these vaccines once they are developed. COVAX plans to have more than two billion doses delivered to countries across the world by the end of 2021. Of the planned doses, about 1.8 billion should be primarily distributed to the 92 poorer countries involved in the initiative. Covering around 20% of their populations, the program is supposed to firstly address high risk and vulnerable people, as well as healthcare and social care workers. With this goal in mind, COVAX has contracted to buy vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Oxford-AstraZeneca (which is most of COVAX’s supply), as well as some not yet approved.
However, some of the wealthiest COVAX participants, such as the US and the UK, have been accused of stockpiling, negotiating bilateral deals with vaccines manufactures to secure further supplies of vaccine. These actions, together with the lack of proper financial support by the same rich countries, risk to undermine COVAX’s strategy and slow down the vaccine roll-out.
Vaccinationalism: a self-defeating strategy
Following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has experienced, at least at the beginning, a global rise of nationalism as countries have engaged in nationalist moves in response to the pandemic, a clear example of which could be the side deals some countries are making for the purpose of ensuring their own population access to the vaccine. Such “vaccinationalism” (Unric, 2020), as this nationalist closure has been called, is self-defeating other than unfair (Hotez, 2020; Unric, 2020).
Life will unlikely return to normal until the vast majority of the global population is protected against the virus and the only way to do that is fighting inequalities and ensuring fairness of the vaccine distribution everywhere and for everyone.
Fabrizio Miceli
Bibliography
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