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Covid-19 Vaccination Campaigns Become Dog-Eat-Dog Competition
February 2, 2021
Army Spc. Angel Laureano holds a vial of the COVID-19 vaccine, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bethesda, Md., Dec. 14, 2020. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando). Credit: Wikipedia
Covid-19 vaccination campaigns have turned into a dog-eat-dog competition internationally as shortages of the coronavirus vaccine have caused some nations to fend for themselves, trying to secure as many doses as possible.
Only a few weeks ago, the arrival of the first batches of the Covid-19 vaccine in each country was cause for jubilation. Today, the procurement of more doses has caused bickering among some.
British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca had promised in early January to supply 80 million doses of its vaccine to the European Union in the first quarter of 2021.
The program will take a while to complete given both countries’ large populations.
Coronavirus vaccination campaigns in both China and India are expected to stretch well into 2022 and more than eighty poor countries will not have widespread access to the potentially life-saving shots before 2023, a new study has revealed.
“Most developing countries will not have widespread access to the shots before 2023 at the earliest,” Agathe Demarais, director of the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research division of the Economist Group, said in the study.
“Some of these countries particularly poorer ones with a young demographic profile may well lose the motivation to distribute vaccines, especially if the disease has spread widely or if the associated costs prove too high.”
More than 80 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been distributed around the world so far. Only 55 55! have gone to people in low-income countries. In fact, just one country: Guinea.
Those 55 doses in Guinea don’t even represent “the start of a ‘real’ national vaccination rollout,” said Edouard Mathieu, head of data at Oxford University’s Our World in Data, which has been tracking the global vaccine effort. Rather, a few Guinean public officials were vaccinated at the end of December with the Russian Sputnik V vaccine on an experimental basis, the Associated Press reported.
“Then nobody was vaccinated after that,” added Mathieu. (The Guinea health ministry has not responded to Vox’s request for comment.) As a result, Our World in Data stopped tracking Guinea’s rollout.