Vaccination in Poor Nations: GAVI asks for political support

Political support is needed for a global scheme to vaccinate people in poor and middle income countries as wealthier nations strike fresh bilateral deals with developers to secure limited supplies, the head of the GAVI vaccine alliance said.

"There is almost a sense of vaccine panic," Seth Berkley, CEO of the GAVI alliance that co-leads the COVAX multilateral vaccine facility with the World Health Organization (WHO), told a press conference for UN correspondents in Geneva on Tuesday.

"The headlines this week clearly just told us how changeable supply scenarios are right now even for well-resourced governments," he said.

The European Commission said earlier it would finalise a proposal by the end of the week to require pharmaceutical firms to register their vaccine exports from the European Union, while insisting it had no plans to impose an export ban.

EU countries learnt late last week that deliveries of the vaccine from AstraZeneca would be some 60% lower in the first quarter than initially indicated. There have also been reduced deliveries of a vaccine jointly produced by Pfizer and BioNTech.

Berkley said that a global political consensus was needed behind the COVAX facility, which he said now aimed to deliver 2.3. billion doses by year-end, including 1.8 billion doses to lower income countries at no cost to their governments.

"We are currently on track to meet our initial objective of vaccinating 20% of the population of each and every lower income country, enough to protect the health workers and the most vulnerable high-risk groups," Berkley said.

'DIMINISHING RETURNS'

GAVI and partners would share "indicative dose allocations" with countries this week, he added.

Berkley, asked about possible EU vaccine export bans, noted that 190 countries had joined the COVAX facility and that US President Joe Biden had announced it was joining and providing significant funding.

"Our hope is this will lead to a consensus of trying to keep the vast majority of work in a pandemic effort to be done through multilateral mechanisms and not bilateral. We have no ability to stop those bilateral mechanisms," he said.

"And the challenge right now frankly is that there are new bilaterals being done now and at some point it goes to diminishing returns, there won't be adequate doses, there won't be adequate supplies for vaccines, the best vaccines may not be able to be scaled up. We are struggling with the number of bilaterals going on."

A World Health Organization (WHO) official said yesterday the COVAX vaccine sharing platform expects to have 25 million vaccine doses for the Eastern Mediterranean region in March, rising to 355 million doses by December.

The first doses provided for the region through COVAX will arrive in February, WHO official Yvan Hutin told reporters.

The WHO's Eastern Mediterranean region comprises of Middle Eastern countries as well as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Djibouti, reports Reuters.

VACCINE DELAYS

The European Union is asking AstraZeneca to publish the vaccine supply contract it signed with the bloc, an EU official said yesterday, amid frustration about delivery delays.

The EU has been slow to rollout vaccination programmes compared with some other regions, especially former EU member Britain. The issue has been exacerbated by AstraZeneca and Pfizer both announcing delivery holdups in recent weeks.

Pascal Soriot, the French chief executive of the Anglo-Swedish drugsmaker AstraZeneca, told newspapers on Tuesday the EU contract was based on a best-effort clause and did not commit the company to a specific timetable for deliveries.

The EU has said this sudden revision was unacceptable and is pushing the company to find ways to deliver more. The EU deemed "inadequate" a subsequent offer to ramp up supplies in February and bring forward the first deliveries.

The coronavirus has killed at least 2,159,155 people since the outbreak emerged in China in December 2019, according to a tally from official sources compiled by AFP yesterday.

More than 100 million cases have now been recorded worldwide, as President Joe Biden pledged to ramp up the United States's struggling vaccine program.

Biden said vaccinating the entire US population was a daunting challenge, and the program inherited from the Trump administration "was in worse shape than we anticipated or expected." "This is a war-time undertaking. It's not hyperbole," he said, announcing the US was buying an additional 200 million doses and will have enough to vaccinate 300 million Americans -- virtually the entire population -- by early fall.

In another day of grim milestones, Britain surged past 100,000 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, and other European nations looked to tighten their borders, hoping to keep out new, more transmissible virus strains.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was "hard to compute" the loss felt by British families after his country became the first European country to surpass 100,000 Covid-19 deaths.

Russia's capital Moscow yesterday announced a further easing of Covid restrictions citing the improving health situation.

"The pandemic is on the wane, and in these conditions it's our duty to create conditions for the economy to recover as soon as possible," Mayor Sergei Sobyanin wrote on his blog.