A Fifth Of World's Population May Not Get COVID Vaccine As Rich Countries Claim It First: Study
A new research by scientists concludes that the availability of Covid-19 vaccine to people around the world might be marred by the existing claims on the vaccine stocks by the rich countries. Through the research, the authors call for a more transparent approach and warn that most of the world will have to be vaccinated to get things back to normal.
When we all heard the news that Pfizer-BioNTech¡¯s vaccine has been approved for use in the UK, people all around the world took a sigh of relief as this meant soon their nation would approve the use of the vaccine too.
But this might not be the case as the next challenge is having adequate supply to vaccinate the whole world, and most developed nations have claimed most of the future stocks of the vaccines.
Wealthy nations, amounting to just 14 per cent of global population, have pre-ordered over half of the vaccine doses expected to be produced by 13 leading pharmaceutical companies next year, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found.
They looked at publicly available data which showed that as of November 2020, 7.48 billion doses have been reserved by richer nations, amounting to 3.76 immunisations since most vaccines require two doses to work. To put things in perspective, the total projection for manufacturing capacity till the end of 2021 is somewhere around 5.96 billion doses.
Representative Image/Reuters
Researchers claim that this could leave populations in poorer nations behind with not enough vaccines for them to acquire.
And this list includes vaccines that are still under development. What's more astonishing is that even if all the vaccine makers manage to make safe and effective vaccines, still nearly a fifth of the world's population won't have access to a vaccine by 2022.
According to the study, it is estimated that up to 40 per cent of the vaccine courses from the leading vaccine makers might be available for low and middle-income nations, but this entirely depends on how much rich countries are willing to share.
Researchers ask for a more transparent approach while also warning that the world won't be able to go back to normal until most of the world gets vaccinated, "To varying degrees, trade with and travel to countries might face continued disruption until access to effective preventive or treatment measures, such as Covid-19 vaccines, becomes more widely available," the report said.
