The Great Vaccine Rollout & The Global Pecking Order

By Rajan Philips –DECEMBER 13, 2020

Rajan Philips

Last Tuesday Britain became the first country to administer the first multi-nationally developed Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine. 800,000  doses of the vaccine are being distributed among the Isle’s four nations in the first stage of the British rollout. Canada is starting its Covid-19 vaccination this week with 250,000 doses of the same vaccine; another 20 million doses are arriving next year along with over 350 million other vaccines. While welcoming the arrival of the Pfizer vaccine as “the beginning of the end of the epidemic in the UK,” Prof. Stephen Powis, medical director of the National Health Services England, has also cautioned that getting to the end itself is going to be a “marathon [and] not a sprint.” Britain has ordered 40 million doses so far and it will cover 20 million people with two shots each, 21 days apart. There are still 47 million to account for. It is a long haul.  

In the US, Donald Trump is not happy that Britain got the vaccine before the US and he is even madder that he will not be able to claim credit for vaccination in America as much of it will happen after he leaves office. In any event, many of his supporters may refuse to take the vaccine because it is not mentioned in the US Constitution! Under its military “Operation Warp Speed” vaccination program, the US has issued purchase orders for 800 million doses from the world’s six leading vaccine contenders, although there is some controversy about the timing of vaccine deliveries. Last Tuesday, Trump issued a meaningless executive order that all vaccines procured by the US must be delivered to the US first before vaccines are supplied to other countries. 

On Friday, the Pfizer vaccine was given ‘emergency use authorization’ by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), amidst controversy that the FDA was under pressure from the White House to expedite the authorization. Friday was also a record black day, with the highest daily numbers of infections, hospitalization, and deaths. More than 3,300 deaths were reported on a single day even as the vaccine rollout was getting underway.       

Russia meanwhile got ahead of both the UK and the US, launching three days before UK its nostalgically named Sputnik V vaccine in Moscow which accounts for about a quarter of Russia’s infections. In a new development last week, Russia’s Gamaleya Institute and AstraZeneca have agreed to carryout clinical trials in Russia to assess if their two vaccines, Sputnik V and Oxford-AstraZeneca, could be successfully combined – with a single shot of each instead of two jabs with the same, to ensure greater protection, a procedure known as “heterologous prime-boost.” 

For several months, China has been conducting mass trials involving millions of recipients for two of its five vaccines in development, Sinovac and Sinopharm. Beijing is yet to announce its internal vaccination program proper, but has already shipped 1.2 million doses of Sinovac to Indonesia, a nation of 274 million people. India has the world’s single largest vaccine manufacturer in the Serum Institute established in 1966, in Pune. The Institute has an annual production capacity of 500 million doses, and has production contracts with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Novavax vaccine. The first 100 million doses of Serum’s production are earmarked for use in India, while the rest will be open for distribution among developing countries. 

The vaccine rollout I have described here is hardly global in that it is tilted entirely in favour of wealthy countries, and excludes much of the rest of the world, with the exception of the two giant outliers – China and India. This global vaccine anomaly is being exposed and criticized by the People’s Vaccine Alliance that includes well known civil society organizations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International, Frontline AIDS, and Global Justice Now. The Alliance has pointed out that wealthy countries representing only 14 per cent of the world’s population have so far reserved 53 per cent of the most promising vaccines, and thereby limited the ability of the world’s nearly 70 poor countries to vaccinate only 10% of their populations for all of 2021. 

A majority of the developing countries are consigned to getting their supply from the pool of vaccines provided by the Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access (COVAX) facility, the global set up by the WHO to ensure “rapid, fair and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines worldwide.” It is a partnership of high-income countries and lower-income countries involving 60% of the world’s population, with the former providing for the supply of vaccines to the latter. The expectations are that the WHO will supply 20% of a developing country’s population at no cost. But the reserved quantities for COVAX, according to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, now amount to a single dose for about three people in developing countries, or 16% of the population. Even that may not be fully available in 2021. The root of this problem is too much reliance on donor charity and too little desire to tackle the structural aspects of the anomaly.    

The Pecking Order

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