Across the globe, countries are locked in both a race against time
and against one another as they battle over vaccine supply.
While Canada has purchased enough shots to vaccinate their population five times over,
low-income nations, such as Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana
are struggling to get even just a small share of the pie.
These nations face a lack of supplies, but also huge logistical challenges with distribution.
So, what can be done to make the Covid-19 vaccine rollout more equitable?
After months of lockdowns, fear and spiralling death tolls,
the world began to see the light at the end of the tunnel when pharmaceutical firms announced
the success of their vaccine candidates against Covid-19 in November 2020.
This paved the way for the first regulator-approved Covid-19 vaccinations in December.
Although more vaccines have been approved since, the reality is that the shots
are not being rolled out everywhere at the same pace.
In low-income nations, the vaccine rollout has been slow,
among the doses we have distributed so far, 75% have been used in just 10 nations.
There are a few low- and middle-income countries among those, most notably India,
but by and large we are talking about wealthy nations.
On the other side of the spectrum there are 80 countries in the world,
representing 1.5 billion people, who have yet to administer a single dose.
So, the early vaccine rollout has been characterized by this inequity.
When looking at the vaccine rollout so far, it is clear that many countries
in Africa, South America and Asia have vaccinated only a tiny fraction of their populations.
In comparison, Israel, the U.K. and the United States are a long way ahead in this race.
Why is it so hard to see vaccinations picking up in these countries?
So, it has been primarily an issue of supply. Right now we have too little of it,
doses are scarce and most of that supply has been purchased in advance
by a handful of nations which are now using those doses.
The U.S. and the U.K., which have had high vaccination rates
through the early months of 2021, were quick to sign deals with pharmaceutical firms
even before they knew whether the scientific work was going to be successful.
These two countries were the first to reach vaccine supply agreements back in May 2020.
Japan followed suit in July while most of Europe, Canada,
and a few other countries struck their first deals in August.
These advance agreements secured their place in line to be among the first recipients of Covid-19 vaccines.
As a result, high-income countries had rights to 4.6 billion doses
of Covid-19 vaccines by the first quarter of 2021.
On the other hand, lower middle-income countries have secured 614 million doses,
while low-income countries are due to receive just 670 million shots.
To overcome supply issues, middle-income nations such as India and Brazil
used their manufacturing capacities to negotiate large agreements with the pharmaceutical firms.
Others, such as Peru, leveraged their infrastructure to host clinical trials to negotiate purchase deals.
But low-income countries are at a disadvantage here, too.
They generally lack large pharmaceutical maufacturing capacity and testing infrastructure.
They are therefore more reliant on multilateral agreements.
The African Union, a group of more than 50 nations,
has collectively bought 670 million vaccines on behalf of its members.
And COVAX, a coalition of international organizations including the World Health Organization and UNICEF,
has secured another 600 million doses for the continent.
In Nigeria, the current pace of vaccinations means that it will be some time
before the population is protected against the virus.
Our target is to vaccinate 100% of the eligible population.
We plan that within the first year, we should be able to vaccinate up to 70% of that population
and then by the second year we should be able to vaccinate the remaining 30% of the population.
So overall, we are looking at being able to vaccinate 112 million Nigerians.
And just to be clear about that timeline that you just shared,
two years would mean that you would probably finish
the vaccination rollout in 2023. Is that right?
Yes, that is what we are looking at. All of these preparations, all of the rollout
will be predicated on the availability of vaccines, so that’s exactly what we are doing,
pacing it along the lines of the availability of the vaccines.
I was just wondering if you could describe as well the challenges of getting the vaccines
and then distributing them across the population?
As you will have observed in the last few months, low- and middle-income countries have had
the challenge of getting vaccines because of the phenomenon of vaccine nationalism.
Most of the developed countries have mopped up a lot of the vaccines.
This is where the COVAX facility has been very helpful,
they have been able to make some vaccines available to low- and middle-income countries.
But simply being able to purchase vaccines isn’t enough.
Local networks to distribute Covid-19 shots also need to be improved.
Some of the most common challenges include a lack of trained medical personnel to administer shots,
insufficient facilities for disposal of biohazard waste,
and the need for some vaccines to be stored at incredibly low temperatures.
There are important differences, which is the ability to get super-cold freezers
in a poorer country is going to be far less, I mean they cost money and there is a limited supply,
and I do think the logistical burden is significant, and the cost burden is significant.
And then there is vaccination hesitancy and a growing tide of misinformation too.
The challenges of vaccine hesitancy will be challenges for all countries.
We haven’t seen it yet because we are still in early phases
where the people who want the vaccine still can’t get it.
We know that vaccine hesitancy is not fixed, it’s not something that cannot be changed,
we do see that levels of willingness to get vaccinated go up and down.
To me that’s actually an encouraging thing to recognize
because it means that public health authorities can take action to try to build that trust.
These challenges will be difficult to overcome, especially if there is little international cooperation.
But it is not an impossible task if world leaders have the will
to end the global health emergency as soon as possible.
If we are going to eradicate Covid-19 as one global community
then it is important that every community has access to these vaccines.
The virus doesn’t know any borders, right, so even if developed countries are able to eradicate it,
as long as low- and middle-income countries don’t have access to the vaccines
then the disease will continue to circulate in these countries.
After the first reports of infections emerged in China in late 2019,
European countries began imposing strict lockdowns and the U.S. was closing its borders in March 2020.
With the emergence of new variants, some of which are more infectious or evade immunity,
protecting populations against mutated forms of the virus will be crucial in moving on from the pandemic.
This is also true from an economic perspective.
The International Monetary Fund had initially forecast a 3.4% rise in global output for 2020.
But shortly after the pandemic hit, early in the year, the IMF cut its projection to a contraction of 3%,
predicting it would be the worst economic shock since the 1930s.
In more recent calculations, the IMF estimated that global economic activity in fact fell by 3.3% over the year,
with the chances of an immediate recovery in 2021 threatened by renewed waves of infections and virus mutations.
Vaccinations will be critical in enabling economic activity to pick up after this severe global recession.
The assumption is that for advanced economies and for some emerging markets,
they will get to widespread vaccinations by this summer,
and for the rest of the world by the end of 2022.
So as long as we don’t see any virus variants that evade the effectiveness of vaccines,
we hope that there will be a vaccine-powered recovery in many countries, especially in the second half of this year.
Why is it so important to vaccinate the whole world?
If we get to much faster vaccination, the cumulative effect will be $9 trillion over 4 to 5 years.
Around 40% of that $9 trillion is benefit to advanced economies,
the remaining to emerging and developing economies.
We are seeing virus mutations happening and as long as many parts of the world remain unvaccinated,
you are going to see many more of these mutations and that is a big concern for the global economy.
If we see vaccinations going at a much slower paces or if we see new virus variants
that evade the vaccine that would have a very sharp downgrade to the outlook.
Helping low-income nations in their vaccination efforts
is a critical test for international cooperation, especially among wealthier countries.
If we are unable, in the midst of a global crisis,
to share a vaccine that it is in every nation’s interest to share,
because it is the fastest way to bring the pandemic under control,
what are the prospects of us cooperating on preventing future pandemics,
what are the chances of us cooperating on climate change,
on nuclear non-proliferation, anything that requires the nations of the world
to trust one another and work together to make us all safer.
If we cannot do it in this crisis, we have little hope in doing it
in the many other areas where we need to see that cooperation.
Hi everyone. Thank you for watching.
How has the vaccination program been going in your home country?
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I’ll see you soon.