Between the failure at G20 and Moderna’s exclusive patent claim—ignoring NIH’s role and public funding—it’s been a bad week for vaccine equity.
The recent G20 meeting failed to deliver on one of its most important issues—addressing vaccine equity. The disparities are stark. In some high-income countries, over 70% of adults have received Covid vaccines. That rate drops to 27% in low- and lower-middle-income countries And in low-income countries, only 3.6% of people have received even their first vaccine dose. The most recent map from the extraordinarily valuable “ Our World in Data,” showing disparities is here: In a recent editorial in Science, authors Priti Krishtel and Fatima Hassan argue that we must waive intellectual property rights surrounding Covid vaccines in order to achieve any hope of vaccine equity. (Krishtel is a Founder and an Executive Director of the Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge, Oakland, US; Hassan is Founder & Director of the Health Justice Initiative, Johannesburg, South Africa). The attempt to provide vaccines voluntarily, through COVAX, the COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Initiative, managed by Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and the WHO, has failed. They delivered supplies late or with little notice, rendering them useless and needing to be thrown out as expired. COVAX relied heavily on vaccines from the Serum Institute of India, but then the Indian government prohibited exports. COVAX was also accused of sidelining the poorer countries in planning and discussions. Wealthy countries, which had bought far more vaccines than they needed, failed to deliver most of the promised doses— only 18% of 785 million donated doses had been delivered by the end of September, far short of the two billion doses that had been targeted for the end of 2021.
