After two years of racing to vaccinate the world against COVID-19, the number of available doses surpasses demand in many areas.Yet a yawning gap remains in vaccination rates between the richest and poorest countries.
Gavi, which co-leads the COVAX global distribution scheme, is scheduled to hold a summit on Friday calling for more funds to address inequality in vaccine access.
More than 13 billion doses have been produced since the pandemic, 11 billion of which have been administered, the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations said.
Yet demand could fall to 6 billion doses this year, federation director-general Thomas Cueni said.
“Since mid-2021, global vaccine production has exceeded global vaccine demand, and this gap has continuously risen,” Cueni said.
Many richer nations are reaching oversupply. The EU and G7 countries had a surplus of 497 million doses at the end of last month.
There are fears that doses could go to waste. COVID-19 vaccines have a relatively short shelf-life; AstraZeneca and Novavax’s jabs have a six-month expiry date, and 241 million doses passed their sell-by date during the pandemic.
Nevertheless, billions of people remain unvaccinated, most of them in developing nations.
COVAX, an international public-private partnership co-led by the WHO and Gavi, has delivered 1.4 billion doses to 145 countries, far short of the planned 2 billion doses expected by the end of last year.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that inequality in vaccine access could lead to the emergence of new, possibly more contagious variants.
The WHO wants 70 percent of every country’s population vaccinated by July.
However, distribution is uneven. For example, nearly 80 percent of France’s population has received two doses, but only 15 percent of the population on the continent of Africa is fully vaccinated, Oxford University data showed.
An average of 42 percent of the populations of 92 low and middle-income countries participating in COVAX have had two doses.
“Vaccine inequity is the biggest moral failure of our times, and people and countries are paying the price,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said earlier this year.
COVAX said it can vaccinate 45 percent of the population in the 92 countries receiving donations, but 25 lack the infrastructure for an effective immunization campaign.
Making matters worse, many developing countries are being donated doses too close to their expiry date. Gavi now directs that doses must be valid for at least 10 weeks upon arriving in countries.
Countries such as South Africa and India have long called for the WTO to suspend intellectual property rights for vaccines and COVID-19 treatments to massively boost production.
After fierce opposition from pharmaceutical giants, a first compromise was reached between the US, the EU, India and South Africa last month, but several key countries such as Switzerland have yet to sign on.
Doctors Without Borders also says there are “key limitations” in the deal, such as covering only vaccines and geographical limits. Pharmaceutical companies say that patents are not the real problem.
Cueni said that the main problem is with logistics.
“What we need is money to have storage, transportation, more trained health workers, campaigns to counter misinformation — these are the real challenges and not the patent waiver,” he said.
Current vaccines target the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 that swept the world in 2020, before variants developed. While the vaccines greatly reduce the risk of serious illness from COVID-19, they only provide partial protection, particularly against newer variants such as the now dominant Omicron variant.
Several vaccine manufacturers have begun testing jabs that target Omicron. They could be available in a few months, if approved by health authorities.
Despite the billions of people yet to receive a first dose, the US, Britain, France and Israel have started rolling out a fourth, starting with the most vulnerable.
The EU’s medicines watchdog on Wednesday approved a second booster for people aged 80 years and over.
However, “No country can boost its way out of the pandemic,” Tedros warned.
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