The world is witnessing a tale of two pandemics.
France is unwinding lockdown measures, while in India, Nepal, Cambodia and Brazil, Covid-19 cases are ratcheting up. “What matters is the momentum, Health Minister Olivier Veran said earlier this month as he celebrated halving the seven-day moving average of new cases in France. But the global momentum is worrying.
According to the World Health Organization, more cases were reported in the last two weeks of April than in the entire first six months of the pandemic. These trends are exacerbated by unconscionable global inequity in access to Covid-19 vaccines. Lower-income countries 47 percent of the world’s population have received only 17 percent of the world’s vaccines, while Europe is already reserving booster doses for use in the coming years.
Lessons
In January, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, issued a blunt warning. The world was “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure,” he said. Wealthy countries were buying up available COVID-19 vaccines, leaving tiny amounts for others a replay of what happened during the 2009 influenza pandemic. “The price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries,” Tedros said.
He was right. Today, some rich countries are vaccinating children as young as 12 years old, who are at extremely low risk of developing severe COVID-19, while poorer countries don’t even have enough shots for health care workers. Nearly 85% of the COVID-19 vaccine doses administered to date have gone to people in high-income and upper middle–income countries. The countries with the lowest gross domestic product per capita only have 0.3%.
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