Vaccine Inequality Persists

Little more than a year into the largest and fastest vaccination campaign the world has ever seen, its biggest flaw persists. Almost fourteen months after a 90-year-old woman from Coventry, England received the first Covid-19 vaccine outside of clinical trials, the gap in global vaccine distribution is wider than ever.

While almost 10 billion vaccine doses have been administered to date, billions of people remain cut off from access to the lifesaving shot. The COVAX initiative, which has been set up to ensure global equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines, has so far fallen short of its goal, despite shipping 1.1 billion doses to 144 countries and territories.

According to estimates from the Oxford University’s Our World in Data, which has been tracking the vaccine rollout from the start, 127 doses have been administered per 100 people worldwide so far. Looking at vaccine distribution by country income group according to the World Bank’s definition reveals the problem, however. As of January 26, 180 doses per 100 people have been administered in high and upper middle income countries, while only 96 and 14 doses per 100 people have been given in lower middle and low income countries, respectively. The latter figure in particular is striking, as it includes 650 million people that are effectively cut off from vaccine access.

The emergence of the Omicron variant has once again underlined the importance of global vaccine availability. For as long as large parts of the world population remain unprotected, the virus will spread and be given the opportunity to mutate, potentially threatening all the progress made in the fight against the pandemic so far.