World has given 10B vaccine doses
When Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel rolled up his sleeve in Decem- ber 2020 to receive a dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, kicking off one of the world’s first mass roll- outs of COVID-19 shots, he declared that it marked “the beginning of the end” of the pandemic.
Thirteen months later, his prediction has proved far from true, but 10 billion vaccine doses have been admin- istered globally, a milestone that reflects the astonish- ing speed with which governments and drug companies have mobilized, allowing many nations to envision a near future in which their people coexist with the virus but aren’t confined by it.
The milestone, reached Friday, according to the Our World in Data project at the University of Oxford, has not been arrived at equitably, even though 10 billion doses could theoretically have meant at least one shot for all of the world’s 7.9 billion people.
In the wealthiest countries, 77% of people have received at least one dose, whereas in low-income countries the figure is less than 10%. As North America and Europe race to overcome omicron surges by offering boosters, with some nations even contemplating a fourth shot, more than onethird of the world’s people, many of them in Africa and poor pockets of Asia, are still waiting for a first dose.
The United States has administered five times as many extra shots — about 85 million — as the total number of doses administered in all of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation.
“Ten billion doses is a triumph of science but a complete failure of global solidarity,” said Madhukar Pai, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at McGill University in Montreal.
And not all vaccines are the same. Those made in China have shown to be less effective than the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. And while nearly all of the world’s COVID vaccines protect against severe illness, early research suggests most offer little protection from omicron infection.
The consequences of the vaccine gap have been highlighted by omicron, which was first identified in southern Africa. Low vaccination coverage creates conditions for widespread virus circulation and with that the possibility of new variants.