An unforgivable moral failure
The G7 summit last weekend closed with optimistic headlines about the group’s efforts to help end the pandemic. Britain and Canada pledged 100 million vaccines as part of an overall commitment to supply 870 million doses to the rest of the world, at least half within a year. Noting that Covid has already claimed more lives in 2021 than it did in all of 2020, the Executive Director of Unicef called the commitment “an important step” towards equitable access for immunization, a policy she described as “the clearest pathway out of this pandemic for all of us — children included.”
The G7 promises may sound impressive but they fall far short of what is needed. At a World Health Organization (WHO) meeting held the same weekend, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghrebreyesus said that 11 billion vaccinations must be administered before the group meets next year if the pandemic is to be brought under control. This would cost an additional US$35-45 billion in funding, a small fraction of the amounts that G7 members have set aside to stimulate their post-Covid economic recoveries.
On the eve of the G7 summit, more than 100 former world leaders called for the group to cover two-thirds of the projected US$66bn that a comprehensive global vaccination programme would cost. That suggestion did not even appear on the summit’s agenda. Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown called this evasion an “unforgivable moral failure” and warned that “Millions of people will go unvaccinated and thousands of people, I’m afraid, will die.”
The G7 promises are also far less generous when examined closely. They mostly involve the dumping of excess vaccines that were acquired ahead of poorer countries. The UK, for example, will have nearly 400 million extra doses after fully vaccinating every adult, yet it has offered a paltry 5 million doses to poor countries before the end of September. Sadly, this is entirely consistent with existing disparities. The WHO summit reported that 44 percent of the world’s current vaccinations are being delivered in wealthy countries while a mere 0.4 percent are being administered in poorer nations.
It is hardly news that rich countries neglect the Global South whenever they can get away with it, but the G7’s stinginess may prove selfdefeating. The longer the Covid-19 virus is allowed to spread the greater its chances of developing a variant that achieves “vaccine escape.” If that happens, the world’s richest countries will only have themselves to blame for the ensuing crises. In the meantime, poor countries will continue their scramble for life-saving medicine while G7 members hoard vast stockpiles of it and try to make their mean-spirited assistance look like largesse.