The Covax Initiative, the developing nations of the South’s hope to immunize their populations against COVID-19, has only reached half its goal by 2021. And as 2022 begins , and the rapidly spreading omicron variant of the virus, the plan still depends on the decisions of the pharmaceutical companies and the goodwill of the donor governments.
José Manuel Durão Barroso, president of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance, one of the organizations leading the Covax initiative, warned from the outset that “as long as a large portion of the world’s population remains unvaccinated, the Variations will continue to emerge and pandemics will follow.”
Durão Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal (2002-2004) and former president of the European Commission (2004-2014), in an email interview with IPS.
Covax, a global outreach fund for a COVID-19 vaccine established in April 2020 as a coalition of countries, multilateral institutions and private organisations, has brought together 184 nation in October of that year and began purchasing and distributing hundreds of millions of vaccines against the epidemic in the developing countries of the South.
Under this scheme, one group of countries self-funds and pays for the vaccines sent by Covax, while the other group, the poorest countries, receives free vaccinations.
Shortly after the first vaccine was introduced in industrialized countries at the end of 2020, an encouraging first shipment of 600,000 doses of the UK Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine arrived at the international airport in Accra, Ghana, the country. The first to benefit from the Covax mechanism, on February 24, 2021.
This initiative has been launched to distribute and apply, in more than one hundred countries, two billion doses throughout 2021, to ensure equitable vaccination for 40% of the world’s population, before reaching 70% in the first half of 2022 – numbers to limit the epidemic
But disaster was lurking around every corner. India has been hit by a sudden, devastating wave of COVID-19 infections and the crowded country has stopped exporting vaccines. And the Serum Institute of India (SII), the world’s largest vaccine producer, is the source of the vaccine for the Gavi-Covax mechanism.
While high-income countries such as the United States, Canada, European countries, and Israel purchase vaccines in large quantities from transnational pharmaceutical companies, sometimes exceeding their populations, The reason is that Covax has to source from India’s SII, where dosages are also cheaper. .
A dose formulated by SII can cost three dollars, compared to more than 50 or 100 percent in a Western pharmaceutical company.
As a result, while vaccine recipients in the South waited for a vaccine under great pressure from their locals, Covax had to announce in April and May that there would be delays, occurring within in the months that followed, leaving many countries in a state of uncertain and helpless waiting while virus variants raged.
By the beginning of January 2022, the number of infections has exceeded 300 million people worldwide and the number of deaths has surpassed 5.5 million, of which the two most populous countries in the South are India and India. Brazil, after the worst-affected country: the United States.
Instead of two billion doses, Covax has distributed less than half of them – 900 million – throughout 2021. And as of November 2021, it has distributed less than 600 million doses, although it has already reached 900 million. for donating 310 million doses in December.
What happens?
Durão Barroso explained that “the unfortunate epidemiological situation in India, combined with the fact that only a few vaccines received the WHO emergency use list and were available for global supply at at that point, significantly delayed the launch of Covax.”
This situation “along with export restrictions, the hoarding of vaccines by many richer countries, and manufacturers not prioritizing vaccines equally, means that we cannot access the full dose that we do.” expect in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of the year”, the head of Gavi.
Kate Elder, senior policy adviser on vaccines at the humanitarian organization Médecins Sans Frontières, recalls when the race against the clock began, “many governments in high-income countries have refers to global solidarity”. (MSF).
“Pharmaceutical companies say they will do their part to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated and that it is not just high-income countries that have access to medical innovations. “, Elder said in his reply to a list of questions from IPS.
“However, this did not happen and calls to move away from the usual business approach were ignored. High-income countries started buying doses of the COVID-19 vaccine even before they could. available,” she said.
The company’s conduct contradicts earlier assertions that antiviral vaccines should be a global public good, and that pharmaceutical corporations, as in other previous cases, have prioritized selling goods to the highest bidder and are primarily looking for their own financial gain, according to MSF.
Donate to
The result of the first months was that Covax delivered just one million doses in February 2021, 23 million in March, 15 million in April and 30 million in May. Early on, it became clear that the target could not be reached. two billion doses in 10 months.
Trust in vaccine delivery mechanisms and in vaccination itself has been eroded, for example in Gambia, Namibia or Nigeria in Africa, or in Afghanistan and Pakistan in Asia. Anxiety also escalated because once the first dose of the vaccine was administered, an even larger second dose was required.
Developing nations in the South have subsequently begun or intensified their search for a vaccine beyond Covax. And in parallel, some have made progress in producing their own vaccines, as is the case with Saudi Arabia, India and Singapore in Asia, Egypt in Africa and Argentina and Brazil. , Cuba and Mexico in Latin America.
In the second half of 2021, donations begin to appear, like a lifeline. Wealthy nations, which have immunized a large portion of their populations and with vaccines or supplies such as syringes readily available, began to fund, often under Covax auspices, millions of doses to countries in developing South.
Donor countries have so far provided 591 million doses of Covax to be delivered in 2021 and the first half of 2022, and the program has sent 259 million doses to recipient countries, which partly explains the increase. delivery speed in November (155 million) and December (310 million) in 2021.
The main donors to Covax are the United States (145 million doses), a group of 16 European Union members (81 million), the United Kingdom (11.5 million) and Canada and Japan (8.4 million doses). every countries).
However, in some cases, doses of medicine that are very close to their expiration date – or lack of syringes or freezers to store them, as in Somalia and East Timor – force them to be discarded or sometimes sent in return, as happened in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan.
The way forward
In Elder’s view, Covax is “incredibly ambitious” and its success “is tied to uncertain assumptions. Predictable challenges were not incorporated into the mechanism design and some key decisions. poor books have been released.”
“From design to governance and accountability, the meaningful exclusion of key stakeholders undermined Covax’s ability to succeed,” said MSF vaccine policy expert essay.
The hoarding of vaccines and medicines by high-income countries has occurred on other occasions, such as during the HIV/AIDS pandemic or in connection with access to vaccines against pneumococcal, viral human papillomavirus or rotavirus.
For Elder, “if we want to learn from this experience to improve access to vaccines, the first step is to create a radical change. This essentially means making the public sector public. technology and innovation of successful medical tools to ensure a fair and decentralized model of production.
“Technology born of public investment cannot be owned by corporations, it must be a global public good,” she said.
In addition, “it is necessary to strengthen multilateral organizations and regional platforms, as each region best understands what its needs are, rather than public-private alliances based on the goodwill of pharmaceutical companies.” , which in the end, we already know what their preferences will be.”
Durão Barroso said that Covax “has reached a point where it can meet the needs of the countries it serves. However, there is a real risk that supply disruptions will continue into 2022.”
So “we’ve asked manufacturers to be more transparent about when they’ll make available dosages available, and from donor governments, we’ve asked for larger and predictable donations.” This has finally happened”, the head of Gavi added.
Durão Barroso stressed that given the spread of different variants “it is paramount that we avoid the scenario of vaccine nationalism 2.0, where rich countries fixate on the supply of new vaccines.
“We depend on nations’ commitment to multilateralism and manufacturers’ commitment to transparency to ensure that we don’t fall behind again,” he said.
© Inter Press Service (2022) – All rights reservedOrigin: Inter Press Service
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