(London) The emergence of the Omicron variant and the planet’s desperate, and possibly futile, attempts to contain it are eloquently reminiscent of what scientists have been warning us for several months: the coronavirus will continue to thrive as long as large portions of the world will not have been adequately vaccinated.
The enormous quantities of vaccines amassed by rich countries have created veritable vaccine deserts, often in less well-off nations, posing a threat to the entire planet.
The more the coronavirus circulates among unvaccinated populations, the more opportunities it has to mutate and potentially become more contagious and deadly, prolonging the pandemic for everyone.
Vaccine shortage in Africa
“The virus is a ruthless opportunist, and we are now paying the price for the inequalities that characterize the global response,” said Dr Richard Hatchett, CEO of the Coalition for Innovations in Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI), who in particular supports the UN initiative to share COVAX vaccines.
These inequalities are particularly glaring in Africa, where less than 7% of the population has so far been vaccinated. South African researchers informed the World Health Organization of the identification of the Omicron variant last week, but it may never be known where it originated. Scientists are now trying to determine if it is more contagious or able to escape current vaccines.
COVAX was supposed to help avoid such inequalities. The initiative is in dire need of vaccines and has already given up on its initial target of two billion doses.
Even to meet its new goal of delivering 1.4 billion doses by the end of the year, COVAX will need to ship more than 25 million doses per day. Its average has been more than four million doses per day since the beginning of October, a figure that sometimes drops to less than one million per day, according to figures analyzed by the Associated Press.
Expeditions have been accelerating for a few days, but we are still far from the goal.
Rich countries are crumbling under stocks
Meanwhile, rich countries are drowning in vaccine stocks and some are even starting to offer a third dose – something the WHO is discouraging, since every third dose is potentially someone else’s first dose. Even though the UN health agency has called for a moratorium on third doses by the end of the year, around sixty countries are still administering them.
“It illustrates the fundamental risks for everyone of not seriously addressing the inequalities that persist in the global fight against disease and health challenges,” said Dr Osman Dar, who heads the One Health Project at Chatham House think tank.
Anna Marriott, director of health policy at Oxfam, says COVAX ran into problems from the start, when it was relegated to the end of the line by rich countries.
“The COVAX team is delivering the vaccines as quickly as they can, but they cannot deliver the vaccines they don’t have,” she said.
Only 13% of vaccines purchased by COVAX and 12% of pledged donations had materialized by mid-November, according to the International Monetary Fund. About a third of the vaccines distributed by COVAX so far have been donations, according to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI).
Last week, COVAX in a statement welcomed the European Union’s commitment to ship 100 million vaccines to Africa by the end of the year – even though only around 5% of those doses were actually on planes.
Asked about the logistics of distributing the 94 million other doses by the end of the year, Aurelia Nguyen, of COVAX, assured that agreements are in place to “transport a large quantity of doses between now and the end of the year “.
The most important thing, she said in a statement, is to ensure that “the conditions on the ground are favorable for the administration of the doses”.
Offload old vaccines to poor countries
The GAVI alliance recently expressed concern that the perception that rich countries are ditching older or less effective vaccines in poor countries could undermine the whole project. In a joint statement released on Monday, notably with the WHO and the African Union, GAVI denounced that “the vaccines given so far have been disorganized, with little notice, and only had a short shelf life ”.
Tens of thousands of expired doses have already been destroyed in Malawi and South Sudan.
But getting vaccines to poor countries is not enough, experts have warned. COVAX is failing to “get vaccines (from the airport) to people’s arms,” said Dr Angela Wakhweya, director of health equity for CARE.
Congolese leaders, for example, returned all cargo received from COVAX this summer when they realized they would be unable to administer the doses before they expired.
GAVI has recently expressed concern about the wasting of certain doses. The logistics of getting the right doses to the right country at the right time alone are problematic. The next step is for often underfunded national health systems to be able to deliver doses where they are needed. We must then convince sometimes hesitant populations to be vaccinated.
WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, however, denies that distribution is problematic, assuring that poor countries simply do not have enough doses.
COVAX mainly has Astra-Zeneca
Most of the doses distributed by COVAX so far have been AstraZeneca’s vaccine, which has not yet been authorized in the United States and whose chaotic roll-out in Europe fueled anti-vaccine sentiment when the product was released. associated with rare instances of blood clots. COVAX has only tiny quantities of the most widely used vaccines in North America and Europe, those from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech.
The European Union has delivered about a third of the 400 million doses it promised, while the United States has delivered less than a third of the 275 million doses promised by the Biden administration.
So far, Canada has pledged to give COVAX 40 million doses it has purchased and pay for approximately 87 million more doses, with a donation of over $ 500 million. About 3.4 million doses have been given to date. The money was sent, but it is not known how many doses were purchased with Canadian funds.
Efforts to speed up global vaccine production are going nowhere, which some attribute to drug companies refusing to give up their intellectual property and the gigantic profits they derive from it.
Since the pandemic has not yet hit Africa as hard as feared, scientists across the continent are now wondering whether they shouldn’t just stop reaching out to rich countries.
“I think Africa could humiliate the world by stopping asking for vaccines,” said Nigerian virologist Christian Happi, who was part of a CEPI advisory committee. The vaccines haven’t arrived, and we may need less of them from the West. ”