The Pandemic Will Never End Without Global Vaccine Cooperation

Physician Alister Martin receives the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at Massachusetts General Hospital. Source: Craig F. Walker/Reuters.

Over the last few months, millions of people across the United States have begun the process of or completed their COVID-19 vaccination. It’s no longer just health care workers and the elderly: technicalities in the “essential worker” category have defined-in individuals who take a few shifts at a restaurant, receive a UNC work-study paycheck, or volunteer at a vaccine distribution site as eligible. Many young people are celebrating the seemingly fast-approaching horizon as they reminisce over last year’s parties with a newfound hope, eager to see the tide finally turning.

But we still ought to ask ourselves one important question: is the tide turning for enough people? While 20-somethings in many states revel in the comfort of being halfway to immunity, dozens of countries have yet to administer a single vaccine.

Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sharply criticized the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, noting that just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations. Canada, for example, has purchased enough vaccines to cover 453% of its population (though it is lagging behind on actual distribution) and the United States has ordered enough supply to fully vaccinate over 90% of citizens by July.  At their current pace, by contrast, the nations of Africa aren’t on track to reach continent-wide herd immunity until 2023 at the earliest.

Much of this global inequality is due to wealth. Those who have the means have been buying up supply since the first clinical trials, purchasing far more than they needed in case any candidates failed. Many other countries, though, have been entirely left out of the loop and now find themselves relying largely on the good will of nations like the U.S. and much of Europe to donate what surplus they have. 

Dollars are not the only forces causing issues of inequality with distribution, however. Britain’s Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab raised alarms about the more than 160 million people at risk of being excluded from coronavirus vaccinations due to high levels of regional conflict and instability in countries like Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, Somalia and Ethiopia. In February, Raab urged the U.N.’s Security Council to pass a resolution calling for cease-fires in conflict zones to allow for vaccine deliveries, citing past successes like polio vaccine distributions in Afghanistan. 

Russia’s U.N. ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, however, objected to the proposed resolution and argued that the Council’s focus on equitable access to vaccines went beyond its mandate to preserve international peace and security. So far, the U.N. has not adopted any measure of support for cease-fires to aid vaccination efforts, despite Britain U.N. ambassador Barbara Woodward’s claim that if U.N. agencies and other NGOs are to be successful in global vaccine distribution, they require the “full backing of the council.”

Other efforts to counteract “vaccine nationalism,” hoarding, and unequal access are underfunded and ineffective. While the United States sits on piles of incoming doses, COVAX — the multilateral initiative designed to ensure equitable vaccine distribution across the world — is struggling to purchase enough doses to cover just 20 percent of the population of lower-income countries by the end of 2021 and is already falling short of its funding goals.

It is easy for those of us who live in wealthy nations with high vaccination rates to think of those in poorer or war-torn countries as pitiable but distant. Something to be concerned about, though lacking any real impact on the success of our own COVID eradication efforts. This assessment, however, is a grave misjudgment. 

Not only is vaccine nationalism and the zero-sum prioritization of one’s own population a moral failing, it is scientifically counterproductive. Epidemiologists have pointed out that when large swaths of the world go unvaccinated, it opens up room for new variants to evolve and weaken the potency of existing vaccines. Countries do not exist in a silo — with an increasingly interconnected planet, a global pandemic must be fought in every corner of the world if there is to be any hope of its end. 

There have been some shifts in western countries’ behavior in the last few weeks. At the last meeting of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations — the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, France, Canada and Italy —  leaders pledged money and extra doses to the world’s most vulnerable, though they failed to provide specific details and appeared unwilling to slow their domestic vaccination campaigns in favor of supporting COVAX. 

China and Russia, on the other hand, are already sending tens of millions of doses abroad, and G-7 countries fear their soft diplomacy may weaken Western presence in Africa and elsewhere. At the February meeting, President Macron warned that if the West did not commit to aiding in global vaccine distribution, “the power of the West will...not be a reality.” However, the French leader did not offer specific vaccine amounts or a timeline for his own country’s contribution. 

Whether it is a battle for world dominance or a deeper moral imperative, we can only hope there will be something compelling enough to motivate change. As the director-general of WHO Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus put it, “To the virus, we are all one herd. To beat it, we must act as one community.”