Hira Bahadur Thapa

While low- and middle-income countries around the world are desperate to get their populations vaccinated on time, the wealthy ones are hoarding vaccines to ensure that each one of their people gets inoculated faster than other nations. Striking bilateral agreements with the vaccine manufacturing companies for the supply of vaccine doses more than required for their entire populations is hardly an ethically defensible action.
The US and some European Union countries have been hesitant to share vaccines with other countries. Italy, one of the 27 member countries of the European Union, was even criticised for declining to share even with her fellow EU citizens. Vaccine nationalism has little regard for regional solidarity. There are legitimate allegations that the US has hoarded millions of doses of AstraZeneca vaccines to tend to its citizens. It has been waiting to get approval from the Food and Drug Agency (FDA) for emergency use. The US has been vaccinating the population at the pace of more than two million per day with Pfizer-Biontech and Moderna vaccines.
While rich nation like this has the luxury of choosing vaccines, a large of number of low-and middle-income nations have not been provided sufficient doses of vaccines. Understandably, there are some countries with no single dose of vaccine administered as of now. President Joe Biden’s announcement that the US might be willing to cooperate in vaccine distribution has raised some optimism at a time when global collaboration looks dismal vis-à-vis vaccine allotment on a massive scale.

Inaction
The lack of international cooperation in the fight against the pandemic exhibited in the poor funding of COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX), has imperiled the path to eliminating the disease. Vaccine rollouts in many countries have shown light at the end of the tunnel. Recently, the Director General of World Health Organisation, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has said that commitment of $7.5 billion by the G-7 nations and US pledge of $ 4.0 billion to COVAX is insufficient. He reminds the donor countries that these donations represent a comparatively small insurance policy against the consequences of inaction.
There is no denying that infection needs to be prevented everywhere otherwise, even the vaccinated people in wealthy countries run the risk of contracting disease when they are in contact with unvaccinated people. This issue of vaccination gets urgency, as new variants of the coronavirus have emerged in Britain, South Africa and Brazil and have spread elsewhere. Scientists have expressed concerns that new mutations of COVID-19 may undo the progress achieved in the development of vaccines. Therefore, the drive for vaccination has to be accelerated. Variants of the virus are troublingly, more contagious and those with weak immune power are likely to be the early victims. New mutations can develop when the virus is able to spread through unprotected populations.
Vaccine inequality seems to be the order of the day if the number of vaccinated people worldwide is any guide. Some rich countries have hoarded vaccines many times more than they actually need. On the other hand, poor nations are not able to buy vaccines for their populations. Health experts believe that such inequality in vaccine distribution is hazardous too. The current global COVID-19 vaccine regime is not fit for providing early protection to the population by increasing vaccination. Vaccine nationalism is defended by some that the nations which have invested huge resources in the development of vaccines should have the precedence in utilising the miracle of science. But their desire to tend to one’s own citizens before worrying about others won’t serve wealthy countries if new variants of the disease prolong suffering and disruption everywhere.
New variants of COVID-19 have already become source of anxiety for the scientists. Scientists should be able to reprogramme the vaccines to be effective against new variants once they have been identified that is one of the advantages of the mRNA technology underpinning the Moderna and Pifzer BioNtech vaccines. Amidst the gloom of lack of accessible and affordable vaccines to achieve community immunity in countries around the globe, some rays of hope have appeared with the decision of the QUAD, an informal alliance of Australia, India, Japan, and US, which it took in its first virtual summit last week, of launching Vaccine Partnership involving different commitments from each of the nations regarding donations to bolster vaccination capacity abroad.
They will also form a QUAD Vaccine Experts group of top scientists and government officials who will work to address manufacturing hurdles and financing plans. However, QUAD’s financial support for vaccine production falls short of urgent calls for immediately supplying ready-to-use doses that can be quickly injected. The current situation of vaccine rollouts in Nepal exemplifies the inadequacy of vaccines in many low-and middle-income countries to get the larger population inoculated. So far about 1.6 million people in Nepal have received the vaccine jabs. Nepal, like many other developing countries may have to wait months, if not years for sufficient vaccinations in view of their limited capacity to buy enough doses.

A sigh of relief
The path to quick inoculation is hampered by ongoing vaccine race. Recent observations from China and the US have given a sigh of relief. The Chinese foreign minister has emphasised that the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines should be accessible and affordable to all countries. In the same vein, the US Secretary of State has underscored the same fact in his recent BBC interview,” Until everyone is vaccinated, then no one is really fully safe”. Their statements are encouraging. Hopefully, vaccines would become affordable to all and the common fight against the pandemic will succeed when rich countries refrain themselves from so-called vaccine nationalism.

(Thapa was Foreign Policy Adviser to the Prime Minister from 2008-09. thapahira17@gmail.com)