Donate unused jabs to low-income nations

Gordon Brown is the WHO’S Ambassador for Global Health Financing and former prime minister; Félix Tshisekedi is president of the Democratic Republic of Congo and chair of the Africa Union; Michel Sidibé is the head of the African Medicine Agency

More than nine months since the world’s first Covid-19 vaccines were administered, and four months after the G7 promised they would vaccinate the whole world, Africa waits. Seventy per cent of Western adults have been fully vaccinated, but still fewer than 5 per cent in Africa. Of the 8 billion vaccines manufactured, only 28 million have been administered in the world’s low-income countries.

The promise, that all continents of the world would be vaccinated together, has not been honoured. The world’s September 2021 target, that all health workers and the vulnerable elderly, in every country, would be immunised – around 10 per cent of the population – has been missed in 56 countries, 39 of them in Africa.

There is a way forward. Some 240 million unused vaccines are currently available in the US, EU, UK and Canada for redistribution, according to the data research agency Airfinity. These doses can be airlifted from the global north to the global south immediately. Another 230 million can be sent out by the end of November, 112 million in December and 280 million in January. We then believe another 245 million could be redistributed in February – adding up to 1.1 billion in total.

These are vaccines sitting in storage or vaccines about to be delivered to Western governments, and could instead be deployed to meet our goals. Indeed, rich nations may throw away as many as 100 million doses of expiring Covid-19 vaccines by the end of the year, instead of donating them to low-income countries. This appalling waste is set to occur because of an inexplicable delay, on the part of the world’s richest nations, in giving away vaccines they don’t need and can’t use before the doses become too old.

This looming crisis results from a near-miraculous transformation in the dynamics of the Covid-19 response. For 20 months, the world raced to develop, test and manufacture enough vaccines to save lives and reopen economies. Rich nations prioritised saving their own populations, where the vaccines were developed, while developing countries largely had to wait.

But even with the well-known struggles of a few manufacturers, vaccine makers in the US, Europe, China and India are now producing about 1.5 billion vaccine doses a month, a level that is expected to reach 2 billion doses a month by December. That is more than enough to meet global goals set by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to first vaccinate at least 40 per cent of people in low- and middleincome countries by the end of this year, and 70 per cent by the middle of next year.

Transferring excess vaccines from the global north to the global south would be an act of statesmanship, but it is not just charity. It is in everybody’s collective self-interest to mobilise all our resources to prevent the disease spreading, and mutating, to come back to haunt even the fully vaccinated.

That is why we are calling upon the G20 leaders, before their meeting on October 30, to each commit to a massive, month-by-month campaign to deliver these surplus vaccines. If necessary, they should call upon their military forces to begin an airlift of these vaccines immediately.

But only the leaders of the major economies can make these decisions. They, and not the WHO nor the International Monetary Fund, nor the bulk purchasing authority Covax, hold the unused vaccines, and so the representatives of the Western states with the most available doses – the US, EU, UK and Canada – should meet in the next few days, to draw up a timetable to get soon-to-be-wasted vaccine doses to low-income countries as soon as possible with, hopefully, other G20 members soon joining the initiative.

Some countries will need assistance on the ground to get the shots into arms effectively. The G20 should give organisations such as the World Bank, the WHO, Unicef, Gavi and others the authority and, if needed, the resources to mobilise these efforts. And we must never leave ourselves unprepared for any future crisis. That is why we favour the establishment of a Global Pandemic Preparedness Board of health and finance ministers, as proposed by director general of the World Trade Organisation, Ngozi Okonjo-iweala, Singapore senior minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, and former US treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, with the support of Mario Monti, the former prime minister of Italy.

Through it, $10 billion can be mobilised per year to build the infrastructure to prevent a repeat of the Covid tragedies. African, Asian and Latin American countries, whose health infrastructure needs the greatest investment, stand to benefit most from this plan.

The 2021 Italian G20 would earn an honourable place in history by securing agreement on its creation.