Fight against Covid-19

A year and a month after that ill-fated March day when the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Covid-19 to be a pandemic, humanity now has available thirteen vaccines approved for emergency use. The pandemic, which has infected 133 million people and left 2.9 million dead, as well as inflicting unprecedented economic and social damage, sparked a race to develop treatments and/or vaccines to combat it. Never before had so many vaccines of such high efficacy been developed in so short a time to prevent a virus-caused disease.

Along with that success, however, 2020 brought a global economic fall of 3.4 percent, the deepest plunge after World War II. Latin America and the Caribbean suffered the harshest punishment, with negative growth reading 7.4 percent, leading to a 12 percent increase in poverty.

Still, as the vaccination process started up at the end of 2020, the new year brought hope for eradicating the pandemic. But that hope quickly gave way to the harsh reality of inequality and the resulting lack of access to the vaccine. Only five countries have had success with their vaccination programs: the United Arab Emirates (with 88 percent of the population vaccinated), Israel (61 percent), the United Kingdom (46.5 percent), Chile (36.7 percent) and the United States (32.1 percent).

Many nations, especially in Africa, have yet to start the vaccination process. And for most of those that have started, the process has been slow. That includes the European Union, even though the European Commission, representing 27 member countries, acquired its vaccine supply with a joint purchase, made well in advance to ensure better prices. The AstraZeneca, Pfizer/BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson laboratories, however, could not comply with the agreed-upon delivery dates, even as some of those countries found themselves threatened with a third wave of infections.

The situation in Latin America is even more serious. Only enough doses are available to vaccinate 5 percent of the population during a period of high infection rates and a rising death toll that have forced many countries in the region to reimpose confinement orders in the face of a collapse of its hospital services capabilities.

Global vaccine production is insufficient, and even that has been hoarded by developed countries that have bought up from two to three times more supply than is needed by their populations, an action that has come to be known as “vaccine nationalism.” What’s more, vaccine purchase does not necessarily equal vaccine availability, as has been the case in Europe and the cause of growing conflict there. These worrisome realities have not motivated developed countries to find a real solution to the need for increased supply. The proposals advanced to confront Covid-19, all of a voluntary character, have either encountered difficulties or failed outfight.

On April 24, 2020, a new initiative was announced with the name of Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator(ACT-A) that calls for international cooperation to speed up the development and production of tests, treatments and vaccines against Covid-19 and to guarantee equitable access to them. The objective is for all nations, especially the poorest among them, to have the same access to testing for the coronavirus and to any treatment that may be discovered.

The most important pillar of this initiative is the Covid-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (Covax), which seeks global financing with a view to equitable distribution. Co-led by the Vaccine Alliance (usually called Gavi for its previous name of Global Alliance for Vaccine and Immunization), with participation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), and by the WHO, Covax was created to coordinate purchases at the international level in order to guarantee that the poorest countries are not left behind in the race to immunize 20 percent of the population in low- and medium-income nations. Its success would obviously depend on the delivery of vaccine doses and on financing to acquire them in the first place.

Currently, 190 countries make up Covax, of which some 90 have financed the development of a set of vaccines that once appeared to be quite promising. At first, the United States, China and Russia declined to participate in the initiative. The U.S. position under the Trump administration, as communicated by White House spokesperson Judd Deere in September 2020, was that “we will not be constrained by multilateral organizations influenced by the corrupt World Health Organization and China.”

On October 8, however, China chose to join the initiative at a time when it had three potential vaccines in Phase 3 clinical tests. The terms of its participation are not clear, but Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Relations Ministry, called it an important step toward assuring equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to developing nations.

Then, on January 21, one day after Joe Biden assumed the presidency, the US government joined the mechanism. That about-face was followed on March 23 by a request from the Russian Direct Investment Fund to participate in Covax, with the understanding that it would give priority to supplying directly its own vaccine whose development it finances, Sputnik V, the most approved vaccine worldwide.

Despite good intentions, the mechanism has failed to live up to expectations. The problem is not in the financing but rather in the scarcity of the vaccines themselves, and their hoarding by rich nations, according to Mexican Foreign Relations Secretary Marcelo Ebrard. Speaking before the UN Security Council on February 17 for all Latin American and Caribbean nations, Ebrard urged developed nations to avoid hoarding vaccines and instead speed up their delivery to the Covax mechanism. “Covax has been insufficient so far,” he said. “The scenario we wanted to avoid has unfortunately been confirmed. To date, vaccines have not been distributed through this international mechanism.”

On May 29, 2020, WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado together launched a project that would create a sort of open-access databank of all technology relevant to Covid-19. Known as C-TAP (for Covid-19 Technology Access Pool), the mechanism allows for the centralization and constant updating of the aggregate of knowledge available for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

Excerpted: ‘The Main Obstacle in the Fight Against COVID: Inequality’

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