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A global vaccine plan is short on doses

Here's the latest news from the global pandemic.

Global vaccine plan is short on doses

For more than a year, Seth Berkley has been saying "no one is safe until everyone is safe." Berkley, an epidemiologist who runs Gavi, a nonprofit that delivers immunizations to poor countries, helped develop the Covax Facility, a public-private partnership aiming to deliver 1.8 billion Covid-19 vaccines to lower-income countries by early 2022.

But the plan is short on doses, which means the pandemic won't end anytime soon. Conceived in early 2020 to fend off what Berkley calls the threat of a "free-for-all, 'Lord of the Flies'" scramble for vaccines, Covax is now facing a shortfall of 190 million doses by the end of June. Some wealthy countries, including the U.S., are beginning to kick doses Covax's way. But the amounts are small and will barely make a dent in plugging the immediate supply gap.

Shipments of the Covid-19 vaccine from COVAX arriving in the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, Somalia, El Salvador and Mexico.

Photographer: Clockwise from top left: WHO, Tiksa Negeri/Reuters, Henny Romero/Reuters, Feisal Omar/Reuters, Jose Cabezas/Reuters, Diomande Ble Blonde/AP Images

Until recently, Covax was woefully underfunded, which meant it struggled to line up early supply deals with promising vaccine developers. Instead, wealthy countries got in line first. An early agreement last summer with AstraZeneca, which promised to sell its vaccine for no profit, helped the alliance start getting vaccines rolled out to poor countries. Indeed, more than 90% of the 81 million doses delivered worldwide by Covax have come from AstraZeneca. But many of those doses were made in India, which has stopped exporting vaccines to fight its devastating second wave.  

Other drugmakers came in with small or late deals. After months of negotiations, Pfizer agreed in January to supply 40 million doses to Covax, but that was less than 2% of its expected 2021 production at the time and most of those doses will only be delivered in the second half of this year. In May, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson agreed to much bigger deals with Covax, but those doses won't arrive until later this year.

Covax raised an additional $2.4 billion at an international pledging summit hosted by the Japanese government on June 2, but what it really needs now is doses. Berkley has been imploring countries to donate vaccines so Covax can at least immunize health-care workers and the most vulnerable around the world. "In a pandemic, timing is everything," he says.        

As cases in the U.S. and Europe decline and vaccines there become plentiful, Berkley says it's dangerous to think anyone is safe. "We're going to have continued evolution of the virus," he says, "and that's just going to come right back and threaten the U.S. as well as the rest of the world." Which leads to an unsettling thought: What if the world isn't actually returning to normal anytime soon?—Stephanie Baker and James Paton

Track the vaccines

More Than 2.19 Billion Shots Given

Enough doses have now been administered to fully vaccinate 14.3% of the global population—but the distribution has been lopsided. Countries and regions with the highest incomes are getting vaccinated more than 30 times faster than those with the lowest. We've updated our vaccine tracker to allow you to explore vaccine rates vs Covid cases in a number of countries. See the latest here.

 

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