Rich countries have already reserved billions of doses of potential Covid-19 vaccines while lower income countries could be left without enough supply for years, a new study has revealed.
Researchers at Duke University’s Global Health Innovation Centre found that high-and middle-income countries have already purchased 3.8 billion doses, with another five billion currently under negotiation or reserved.
While many of these wealthier countries have joined Covax, a World Health Organization-linked initiative to equitably distribute vaccines across the world and discourage hoarding, the study suggests that separate deals between countries and drug manufacturers are undermining this effort.
These direct deals made by mostly high-income countries “result in a smaller piece of the pie available for equitable global allocation”, the researchers warn, with current models predicting that there will not be enough vaccines to cover the world’s population until 2024.
High-income countries currently hold a confirmed 2.2 billion doses, the analysis found, while upper middle-income countries hold 544 and lower middle-income countries hold 740.
But researchers were not able to find any evidence of direct deals made by low-income countries, suggesting that low-income countries will be “entirely reliant” on the 20 per cent coverage from Covax.
And while some middle-and low-middle income countries have secured direct deals, none of them have enough to vaccinate their entire populations.
At the same time however, Canada has purchased enough potential doses to vaccinate its entire population five times over, while the UK has also reserved more than enough to vaccinate its entire population. The European Union has similarly secured hundreds of millions of doses.
The United States, which did not join Covax in part because the Trump administration did not want to work with the WHO, has agreements to buy enough doses for 455 million people - more than its population. It could eventually control 1.8 billion doses, or around a quarter of the world’s “near-term” supply, the analysis found.
While these purchases make sense for individual countries, they undermine efforts to secure enough doses for low-income countries, researchers said.
The findings follow repeated warnings from health experts against “vaccine nationalism”, with recent analysis finding that the practice of governments signing agreements with manufacturers to supply their own populations with vaccines first could cost the global economy up to $1.2 trillion dollars.
With limited purchasing power, some middle-income countries with manufacturing capacity, such as India and Brazil, have used other strategies to get to the front of the vaccine queue, including negotiating manufacturing agreements with leading vaccine candidates.
Despite India being known as the pharmacy of the developing world, however, experts have cautioned against the country being a silver bullet against vaccine nationalism.
“Even though India has such a huge vaccine production capacity, there is definite reason to still be concerned about vaccine nationalism,” said Dr Rory Horner, an expert in globalisation and political economy at the University of Manchester.
“Given the scale of the demand from Covid-19, India itself cannot supply the world or overcome vaccine nationalism itself in the short-term,” he told The Telegraph.
“The question is not whether people get access, it’s when. I’d be optimistic that eventually everybody who should get a vaccine will, but that’s problematic if it’s six months’ time for some and three years for others - if that distribution is not in accordance with what we need.”
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