As the rollout of Covid vaccines continues at pace, there are concerns low-income countries will miss out as wealthier ones snap up supplies. Last week New Zealand announced it had secured access to 15 million vaccine courses, ensuring every New Zealander could be protected from Covid-19.
But data calculated for the People's Vaccine Alliance, a grouping of organisations including Amnesty International and Oxfam, found nine out of ten people in 70 low-to-middle income countries will miss out on the vaccine. The Alliance is calling on governments in wealthier nations to take steps to ensure vaccine access is fair, and for pharmaceutical companies to openly share their technology and put people before profit.
A health official takes a swab sample from a woman to test for the Covid-19 coronavirus at a testing point in Allahabad, India Photo: AFP
An organisation, Covax, has been set up to help assist with buying power for poorer nations, but Oxfam UK’s Health Policy Manager Anna Marriot says they’re already struggling.
“Not enough vaccines are actually being made and we’ve got two problems here: first is that not enough is being made and the second is that the vast majority of the supply is already being bought up by rich countries.
Marriot says many rich countries have bought enough to vaccinate their populations three times over. However, she says there doesn’t need to be a choice between vaccinating people in rich countries or poor countries if the supply problem can be addressed.
“To do that, we need pharmaceutical corporations to step away from business as usual and openly share their vaccine research and know-how so that we can get more manufacturers on board, especially in developing countries, to increase production and flood the world with cheap, safe, and effective vaccines and end this crisis for everyone as soon as possible.”
She says that, overall, rich countries – which represent 14 percent of the world’s population – have already secured more than half of the available vaccines for next year.
“These figures are changing all the time, it’s a very dynamic and fluid situation, and we have seen some vaccine manufacturers announce delays such as Sanofi-GSK which is now not set to be produced until possibly 2022. That actually means that Covax is suffering more, because it had a deal with that vaccine candidate, so we could see even more people missing out on a vaccine next year.”
One possible solution, floated the World Health Organisation, is the Covid Technology Access Pool.
“We would like to see Covax working with this technology access pool to ensure that pharmaceutical corporations pool their knowledge, pool their science, and transfer their technology into this WHO governed pool so that those manufacturing capacities can be scaled up.”
However, so far no pharmaceutical company has come forward to say they will work the WHO on sharing technology or science.
“We urgently need to see some of those companies stepping forward.”
Another proposal to the World Trade Organisation, from the South African government and Indian government, asks that for the duration of the pandemic, all intellectual property rights for vaccination and treatment be waived.
“That proposal is currently being blocked by rich country governments who currently have enough vaccines their population but are not willing unblock those artificial barriers… so we need to see all governments standing behind the South African and Indian government proposal.
“Just for the period of this pandemic, let’s remove those intellectual property rights and get to the solution as quickly as possible and upscale that production.”
