Covid Vaccine: Wealthy nations stockpiling 1b extra shots
Rich countries are on course to have over a billion more doses of Covid-19 vaccines than they need, leaving poorer nations scrambling for leftover supplies as the world seeks to curb the pandemic, a report by anti-poverty campaigners found yesterday.
In an analysis of current supply deals for Covid-19 vaccines, the ONE Campaign said wealthy countries, such as the United States and Britain, should share the excess doses to "supercharge" a fully global response to the pandemic.
The advocacy group, which campaigns against poverty and preventable diseases, said a failure to do so would deny billions of people essential protection from the Covid-19-causing virus and likely prolong the pandemic.
The report looked specifically at contracts with the five leading Covid-19 vaccine makers - Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Oxford-AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax.
It found that to date, the United States, the European Union, Britain, Australia, Canada and Japan have already secured more than 3 billion doses - over a billion more than the 2.06 billion needed to give their entire populations two doses.
"This huge excess is the embodiment of vaccine nationalism," said Jenny Ottenhoff, ONE Campaign's senior director for policy.
"Rich countries understandably hedged their bets on vaccines early in the pandemic but with these bets paying off in spades, a massive course correction is needed if we are going to protect billions of people around the world," she added.
The analysis found that, along with other Covid vaccine supplies procured by the global Covax vaccine-sharing plan and in bilateral deals, the excess rich-country doses would go a long way to protecting vulnerable people in poorer countries.
This would significantly reduce the risk of deaths from Covid-19, it said, as well as limiting the chances of new virus variants emerging and accelerating an end to the pandemic.
The World Health Organization on Thursday urged nations with vaccines not to share them unilaterally, but to donate them to the global Covax scheme to ensure fairness, reports Reuters.
Meanwhile, the European Union announced it is doubling its contribution to the Covax global Covid-19 vaccination programme to one billion euros ($1.2 billion) at a G7 meeting yesterday.
US President Joe Biden also pledged $4 billion in aid to Covax during the virtual meeting with other leaders from the Group of Seven major industrial nations.
The move comes as world powers look to ramp up support for poorer nations in the face of accusations that rich countries are hoarding vaccines against the coronavirus and leaving other parts of the globe behind.
UNIVERSAL VACCINE
The prestigious journal Science on Thursday published an editorial calling for a global effort to develop a universal coronavirus vaccine that would remain effective against other members of the same virus family that might cross over to humans.
Wayne Koff, head of the Human Vaccines Project, and Seth Berkley, who leads the global vaccine alliance Gavi, said that although the Covid-19 pandemic was far from over, humanity now possessed the tools to end it and was undertaking the most rapid immunization campaign in history.
But, they warned: "More virulent and deadly coronaviruses are waiting in the wings. Thus, the world needs a universal coronavirus vaccine."
SARS-CoV-2 belongs to a diverse group of viruses, of which there are thousands, characterized by their crown-like appearance, which comes from the spike proteins that dot their surfaces.
They are capable of infecting a wide range of animals, from bats and pangolins to pigs and mink, reports AFP.
Four coronaviruses are known to cause common colds in humans, and historically they have been deemed a low priority for research.
That changed with the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak that eventually killed some 8,000 people with a fatality rate of 10 percent.
Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus (MERS-CoV) in 2012 was 34 percent fatal.
Koff and Berkley wrote there was a risk that SARS-CoV-2 may mutate in ways that will render current vaccines less effective -- as has already been seen with the South African variant -- or even become ineffective.
Moreover, the potential is growing for other coronaviruses to jump the species barrier.
"Modern agricultural practices, viral evolution, and relentless human encroachment on the natural environment mean there is an increasing risk of people encountering previously isolated animal populations that harbor new strains with pandemic potential," they said.
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