The failure to put vaccines into the hands of people in the developing world is coming back to haunt us despite repeated warnings. We were warned and we are here.
In the absence of mass vaccination, Covid is spreading and is mutating, with new versions emerging out of the poor countries and threatening to unleash themselves on people in the richest countries of the world.
The Department of Health in the UK warned on Thursday that the B. 1.1.529 variant was the most complex and worrying one so far. With 9.1 billion vaccines already manufactured and 12 billion expected by the end of the year, we could have won the war. There is a new wave of Covid hanging over us and no country should be facing another winter.
The World Health Assembly will meet in a special session on Monday. They will be told that the vaccination rates in the six countries that are subject to the UK travel ban are still dangerously low. Only 25% of the population in Zimbabwe have had a first vaccine. Only 27% and 22% of the people in Eswatini have had the Johnson and Johnson single-shot vaccines. Only 12% of the population in Namibia are fully vaccined.
South Africa has achieved 27% vaccination rates, but its rural areas are often in single figures, and the whole of the continent is justifiably angry because their own efforts to vaccine have been impeded for months by the European Union. The EU insisted on taking millions of South African-produced one-shot vaccines out of Africa in order to fill the gap between Europe and Africa.
Boris Johnson promised in June that the G7 countries would use their surplus vaccines to immunise the world. In September, a summit chaired by President Biden set a December target of 40% vaccinations for the 92 least developed countries. There is little chance that this target will be met in at least some of them. The US, which has been responsible for half the vaccines donated, had still delivered only 25% of the vaccines that it promised.
It's even more embarrassing that the rest of the world fails. The European Union has delivered only 19%, the UK has delivered 11%, and Canada has delivered 5%.
China and New Zealand have delivered over half of what they promised. Australia and Switzerland gave 18% and 12% of what they offered, respectively.
Only 3% of people in low-income countries are fully vaccineed, while the figure is over 60% in both high-income countries and upper-middle-income countries. Every day, for every vaccine delivered as the first in the poor countries, six times as many are being administered as the third and booster vaccines in the richest parts of the world. The World Health Organization is predicting 200 million more cases of vaccine-preventable diseases, due to vaccine inequality. 5 million deaths to Covid are thought to be possible in the next year.
The policy failure is not because we are short of vaccines or manufacturing contracts to secure them. The problem is not in production but in the distribution of vaccine. The G20 richest countries have a stranglehold on vaccines, with 89% of them being monopolised by them. Covax, the global vaccine distribution agency, has only been able to get two-thirds of the vaccines promised to poorer countries.
The good news is that our medical genius has ensured that the new Nu variant has been identified quickly, is being mapped at speed, and if it proves to be more transmissible but immune to current vaccines, a new vaccine could potentially soon emerge. There is only a Herculean effort this week to allay fears that new Covid will take place in the least protected places.
We can act quickly. 500m unused vaccines are available across the G7. By February, 850m vaccines can be sent to the countries in greatest need, as the figure will rise to 600m by December. The US has over 200m vaccine doses it can immediately deliver to the rest of the world, which will grow to over 200m next month, and Europe has even more: 250m, which by February could exceed 350m. Over the next three months, the UK is expected to have 46 million vaccines.
Vaccines are being destroyed while lives are being lost because of lack of them. Around 100m of western countries' vaccines could easily go to waste in December, according to the data research agency Covax. There will be issues of absorption in Africa, but the bigger problem is that too many of the vaccines gifted to the poor countries are within a year of their use-by-dates. These short lead times between donation and expiration show why a strengthened G20 and a month-to-month delivery timetable is now urgent, and why the transfer of delivery dates from rich to poor countries is the best.
There is an urgent need for a non-proliferation treaty. A new and binding international agreement that the World Health Assembly will consider next week must improve our surveillance and early warning systems, ensure the early transfer of medical supplies to countries in need, and finally agree sufficient funding of a worldwide effort to deliver what is clearly the most important global public good of all We must reject vaccine nationalism and medical protectionism if we are to stop epidemics.
The WHO ambassador is Gordon Brown, who was the UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010.
