Africa’s vaccine crisis: It’s not all about corruption

Domestic failures in themselves do not explain the global inequality of outcomes when it comes to vaccines.

The third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is taking its toll across the world, with many countries reporting higher than ever numbers of infections and hospitalisations. The good news is that in countries where vaccines are available there are overall lower mortality numbers, affirming that at a community level, vaccines are working. The bad news is that with a conspiracy of international politics, profiteering and domestic complacency, the vast majority of the world’s population remains unvaccinated. As of July 2021, only 25.3 percent of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, and of the 3.4 billion doses that have been administered worldwide, only one percent has been administered in low-income countries. We are free-falling into an era of unprecedented inequality, thanks in great part to the poor decisions being taken by the world’s political class. The world was already deeply unequal with poor countries carrying the lion’s share of the global disease burden with sparse resources. But despite assertions that this pandemic would be a great equaliser, it is instead turning out to be an accelerator of inequality. The wealth of the world’s billionaires grew by 45 percent or about $1.3 trillion since the first COVID-19 cases were recorded in China’s Wuhan province in December 2019, yet by United Nations estimates, global unemployment will rise to its highest levels in history with more than 200 million new cases as a direct result of the pandemic. All of which makes the current global vaccine inequality particularly threatening. Billions of lives are at risk because rich countries are standing in the way of making vaccines more freely available, threatening to compound the already exacerbating inequalities. In contrast, 69 percent of Canada’s population of 38 million has received at least one dose of the vaccine while only 65,000 people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (population 89 million) have received at least one dose. Between them, United States pharmacy chains Walmart and CVS have wasted at least 180,000 doses of vaccine – more than most African countries have administered. And the COVAX initiative, designed to make global access to vaccines more equitable by coordinating countries to buy enough vaccines for 20 percent of their populations so that at least all healthcare workers in the world could be vaccinated – has run out of vaccines. COVAX was purchasing most of its vaccines from India, but the “vaccine factory of the world” has introduced export controls after being battered by the third wave of COVID-19.