Great Covid recovery

Happy birthday, Covid. It’s been a year since you arrived on our shores, upending our lives and testing us like no other event in living memory. The vaccine roll-out across the globe is the first light at the end of the tunnel, and the prospect of a return to normal life is drawing closer.

But not for everyone. Large parts of the world will remain in a dark place for some time to come.

Access to Covid vaccines will determine the scale and speed of recovery.

Rich nations are already well on their way to inoculating all citizens by the end of the year.

Many Western countries – including New Zealand – have ordered enough doses of vaccine to cover their populations many times over.

As we plan future travel bubbles, holidays and talk of ‘‘vaccine passports’’, poor countries are being trampled on in the race for immunity. African countries like Sudan and Mali won’t have coverage until 2024.

There are risks in this for all of us. This pandemic is global and new clusters and variants will spread beyond borders. No-one is safe until everyone is safe.

China and Russia have already sought to exploit the vacuum, boosting their geopolitical reach with vaccine diplomacy in Brazil and African and Asian countries.

Inequality in global health is nothing new (90 per cent of the world’s pharmaceutical products serve 10 per cent of its population). But compound that with heightened existing economic and social inequalities, and our post-Covid world will be even more divided between the haves and have-nots.

Oxfam predicts it could take more than 10 years for the world’s poorest people to recover from the