Where are we on vaccinating the world?
First doses of a Covid vaccine will begin being given to 16 and 17-year-olds in the UK within weeks after government experts reversed a previous decision to only make the jab available for the most vulnerable under-18s.
The move brings the UK in line with several other European countries that have already started vaccinating teens, as well as the UAE, Israel, Japan, Singapore, US, China, Canada, and the Philippines.
It is yet to be seen how many British teens will take up the jab – but the move has reignited debate over whether offering the vaccine to low-risk teenagers, as well as ‘booster shots’ to those who are already fully vaccinated, will hamper efforts to distribute first doses to more vulnerable adults around the world.
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, says teenagers should not be a priority when there are “plenty of other people who are at serious risk of death”. He said: “The moral failure… is to allow people to die around the world, while we vaccinate people who are at extremely low risk of serious disease or death or even zero risk.”
But what is the current situation with the global vaccine drive?
The Covax scheme was set up last year to ensure that Covid vaccines were made available around the world, with richer countries subsidising the costs for poorer nations. The initial aim of the scheme was to make two billion doses available to participating countries by the end of 2021- enough to protect high risk and vulnerable people, as well as frontline healthcare workers.
So far, the programme is falling short of its goal. Covax has purchased 3.2 billion doses – up from 1.1 billion in March, according to data from the Duke Global Health Innovation Center. But, as of today, it has only shipped around 180 million doses.
In part, this is due to rich countries hampering the scheme. Covax struggled with both funding and supply earlier in the pandemic, when wealthy nations bought up initial shipments of doses – and the ongoing resistance to waiving patent rights on vaccines has been an additional barrier.
Many countries have also been slow in delivering on their Covax pledges. In June, G7 leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States pledged to donate one billion vaccine doses to poorer countries by the end of the year – half of which would come from the US. However, the UK only started delivering 9 million doses of the vaccine last week, and the US has currently shipped just 110 million shots abroad.
This month, the WHO called for a moratorium on Covid vaccine booster shots until at least the end of September to address the drastic inequity in dose distribution between rich and poor nations.
But there are several other factors behind the delay.
The Indian Covid crisis has been a severe stumbling block. The Serum Institute of India was meant to provide a third of Covax vaccines this year but had sent out only 30 million doses before the government banned exports in March due to domestic demand during this summer’s devastating second wave of the pandemic.
There are also flaws in Covax’s own distribution strategy. As Monica de Bolle, professor at Johns Hopkins University, explains, Covax primarily allocates vaccines in proportion to population sizes, which is not the best public health metric – and it does not consider countries’ capacities to roll out massive immunisation campaigns.
All of this is a problem because a low rate of vaccination in poorer nations not only fails to protect those who are most vulnerable to the disease, but also allows the virus to circulate – increasing the likelihood of it mutating into a variant that is more resistant to the current vaccines.
Around 11 billion doses are needed to fully vaccinate 70 per cent of the world’s population against Covid. So even if Covax does succeed in delivering its two billion goal by the end of this year, richer countries need to do more to tackle vaccine inequality if they are ever going to bring the virus under control.
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