Rich countries still need to step up on global COVID vaccine access

Among the G20 goals being pursued by the Indonesian chair this year is ‘ensuring equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines’. This has become a pressing task, though one that’s part of a bigger picture. Developing country vulnerability means global vulnerability. The Delta variant, first detected in India in April 2021 before becoming a world crisis, illustrates the danger of having large pockets of unvaccinated people. There is both an ethical and a self-interested reason for helping poorer countries cope with COVID-19. Between mid-2020 and the end of 2021, 10 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses were produced and there is now global capacity to produce 12 billion doses a year. But distribution has been highly uneven with less than 1 per cent of the vaccines going to low-income countries. The World Health Organization’s (WHO) COVAX initiative has fallen well short of its target of delivering two billion doses to lower-middle and low-income countries by the end...