Let G20 nations stop Covid-19 vaccine apartheid

The novel coronavirus has exposed glaring flaws in the world’s collective ability to respond to infectious disease outbreaks, including wealthy countries’ unwillingness to cooperate on vaccine equity.

Since the world’s wealthiest countries have been the primary contributors to the global disparity between the vaccine haves and have-nots – African leaders must push G20 heads of state to rectify the life-threatening vaccine imbalance at the October summit in Rome, Italy.

As of early October 2021, 3.6 billion Covid-19 vaccine doses had been administered globally, with 78 per cent going to people in high and upper-middle-income countries. Less than 7 per cent of the 1.3 billion people in Africa have received even one dose. The discrepancy is worse for people in low-income countries where less than 1 per cent have gotten a shot.

It’s no surprise that there are not enough doses to vaccinate our world when wealthy countries have secured enough vaccines to inoculate their populations as much as five times over, according to Duke University. Although the world will have created 11 billion doses by the end of this year, almost 9.9 billion of those have been promised to wealthy nations. The Covax initiative, while promising, was to supply lower-income countries with sufficient vaccine doses. However, that mechanism clearly has fallen short of its initial goal to vaccinate 20 per cent of recipient countries, which is still far too little when the World Health Organisation (WHO) states that a vaccination rate of 70 per cent is required to protect the world.

A debate in the US and other high-income countries is around booster shots. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently said it was “unconscionable” that some countries are offering booster shots “while so many people remain unprotected.”

African leaders must amplify their voices in a combined effort to demand that G20 leaders prioritise global vaccine access for majority of nations.

That must start with pushing pharmaceutical companies to share their know-how and technology to increase production in Africa and globally. Africa can no longer wait for vaccine charity, it is time to get rid of patent monopolies for successful vaccines against Covid, whose development was supported by $100 billion in public funding from taxpayers in US, Germany and other countries.

Taxpayers were the primary funders of Covid-19 vaccine production – the world owns that intellectual property, not the drug companies profiting from the pandemic.

Dr Amor is Africa Bureau Chief for AIDS Healthcare Foundation.