Opinion | How the rich world’s vaccine nationalism will cost everyone in the end
- Just as travel bans have failed to keep Covid-19 variants out of countries, vaccine nationalism will fail too
- The longer that the wider world remains unvaccinated, the more variants are going to spread. Some may not be as responsive to current vaccines
Wealth is health. Never has this been more apparent than in the way the Covid-19 pandemic has played out across the world. According to data from UNAids, rich nations are vaccinating one person every second, while the vast majority of poorer nations are yet to give even a single dose.
Indeed, economic recoveries are diverging dangerously, the International Monetary Fund warned earlier this week. While it comes as no surprise that higher-income nations have used their financial might to monopolise vaccines, the sheer scale of that monopoly is still startling.
Out of the almost 426.5 million people who are fully vaccinated throughout the world, a huge chunk – 135.09 million – are from the United States. Not only has the US vaccinated more than any other country, in early March, it was sitting on tens of millions of AstraZeneca vaccines that were pending regulatory approval.
This overzealous stockpiling of vaccines isn’t just a US problem. In 2020, reports said Canada had bought vaccines for more than four times its population and Britain had more than five doses per person on order.