This was the messaged delivered by Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO in his keynote speech at the 138th International Olympic Committee Session on 21 July 2021. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus once again emphasised the dangers of the two-tack pandemic fuelled by vaccine inequity across the world.
A recent report by the Kaiser Family Foundation based on country-level data up to 7 July 2021 found that the equity gap in access to vaccines is growing. The report concluded that it would be impossible for many lower income countries to reach the global targets of vaccinating 40% of the population by end of 2021, and 60% by the middle of 2022. In terms of the share of the population with at least one dose by country income level group, the findings were:
- High income – 51%
- Upper-middle income – 31%
- Lower-middle income – 14%
- Low income – 1%
Across the six WHO regions the highest proportion of people with at least one dose were in the European Region (40%), the Region of the Americas (39%), and the Western Pacific Region (37%). The other three regions are lagging behind with 17% of people with one dose in the South-East Asia Region, 9% in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, and just 1% in the African Region.
A recent forecast showed that despite increasing vaccine donations, dose sharing and additional funding pledges to the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, the Gavi COVAX Facility will continue to experience supply issues in the next few months. There are some reasons for hope though. After months of discussions, the process of setting up vaccine manufacturing facilities in Africa has started, and in concert with speeding up the deliveries of donations the disparities in access to vaccines could start to improve. A new initiative to accelerate access to vaccines in developing countries was announced on 26 July by Gavi COVAX and the World Bank. Under this financing mechanism countries will be able to purchase additional doses through COVAX and get better transparency about the related windows of delivery for specific vaccines. The only constraint that remains is the limited supply of vaccines from manufacturers. Which means that more efforts to increase manufacturing capacity are needed, because as Dr Tedros noted in his speech, “the pandemic will end when the world chooses to end it.”
For more information see our COVID-19 Health Funding Tracker.
For all our blog posts, see our COVID-19 Health Funding Tracker News Feed.
