Fight against Covid-19
High rates of vaccination and summer weather in the Northern Hemisphere have given many in the West new hope for the end of Covid-19. It is tempting people to chart new life paths as they glimpse what they believe to be a post-pandemic future.
It's an illusion.
The failure of the rich world to help vaccinate developing countries in a manner that matches the West threatens the very success the rich believe to be at hand.
Large swaths of the Global South, including most of Africa, now are in the grips of a new wave of Covid-19 infections. It's foolish of the West to think it can regain normalcy when new virus variants will continue to emerge because not enough people around the globe are being vaccinated.
A map of well-vaccinated and under-vaccinated nations might draw comparisons to atlases of the early 20th century showing colonized countries.
South Africa, the continent's most industrialized country, is a prime example of the worrying trend. With the onset of winter in the Southern Hemisphere and a dismal vaccination rate, it is currently in the grips of its third wave of infection, one that is proving to be the most deadly yet.
Hospitals in Johannesburg are running out of beds and oxygen as the country battles the Delta variant. There is talk of renewed hard lockdowns, but no clear plan to fight infections other than to wait out this wave and hope for more vaccines.
It will be a long wait.
One reason is the failure of the Covax vaccine procurement program to achieve its initial goals.
Launched a year ago, the Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access program was heralded as an "unparalleled and ambitious" effort to create a global procurement mechanism to supply vaccines to all countries. Ninety-two of the world's poorest and middle-income countries were supposed to receive vaccines at no cost.
High-income nations would pay for their vaccines through Covax. Together, the two arms of the mechanism were meant to see an orderly roll-out of vaccines throughout the world.
Instead, rich nations began to sign deals directly with vaccine makers even before the shots were ready. And because governments couldn't be sure which would work, they bought from multiple pharmaceutical companies, reserving more doses than they needed.
Meanwhile, Covax began to make concessions to rich countries, letting them choose which vaccine they would receive under the program, and then later letting them purchase enough vaccines for up to 50% of their population. Poorer countries, however, would still only get enough for up to 20% of their population.
All the above has been the mechanism through which rich nations have hoarded most of the available doses. Ten countries have administered 75% of all the Covid vaccines produced so far.
It is this that has allowed the West to glimpse the possibility of normalcy - most often celebrated in social media as the ability to visit a pub or bar for a pint or two; to go on vacation, sometimes abroad; to visit sport arenas and fitness facilities. Meanwhile, in India, South Africa, the Philippines and so on, scenes of actual dystopia persist.
The failure of Covax can't be explained away by greed alone. An article in the medical journal The
Lancet explains that "global health experts point to [Covax'] failure to recognize supply constraints as a major obstacle to global vaccination and emphasize diversifying and scaling up manufacturing from the beginning. This lack of recognition was a serious flaw in the Covax design."
With Covax much compromised, there are new efforts afoot to supply emerging markets with vaccines. France, commendably so, and the World Health Organization announced on June 22 that they would help South Africa set up a production facility for Covid-19 vaccines.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Africa now understood that vaccines would "never come" from elsewhere in time to save lives. Thus his country and the continent needed to start producing its own. He may be right. However, the initiative is going to be too late as a remedy for the current wave of infections sweeping the continent. And maybe even for this pandemic as a whole. Moreover, while South Africa may have the soft and hard infrastructure to build a vaccine facility, most emerging countries don't.