Efforts to increase the supply of vaccine available worldwide got a booster shot of sorts this week after a global COVID-19 summit of world leaders hosted by the US.
The summit pushed for more ambitious global targets to end the pandemic and created high-level accountability to help meet these targets. Among other pledges, the US announced donation of an additional half a billion vaccine doses to low and middle-income countries.
Additional dose donations were pledged from Italy, Japan, Spain, New Zealand, and Denmark, while India conveyed exports of vaccines will resume soon.
One key takeaway: It’s not too late to bring the pandemic under control.
“I think (ending the pandemic) is still a solvable problem and that it can be done, as long as you can get the countries and the vaccine manufacturers to come together and deliver on these targets,” IMF Chief Economist Gita Gopinath said in an interview with Reuters this week before the meeting.
A proposal laid out by Gopinath and IMF economist Ruchir Agarwal set a target of vaccinating 40 percent of the population in all countries with at least one dose by the end of this year and 60 percent of the population in each country by the middle of 2022.
Good news, bad news: The good news is that the world this week reached an overall 40 percent vaccination rate of at least one dose. The bad news: Only about 2 percent of people in low-income countries have received the vaccine.
The wealthy Group of Seven countries have delivered only about 14 percent of the total vaccine doses promised to COVAX. Increasing that to 50 percent would be needed to reach the global target for 2021, Gopinath said in her interview. As the map below shows, large swaths of the world will not reach the target under the status quo.
Three big things: Reaching the goal of vaccinating 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 is still feasible, but to do so vaccine manufacturers and high-income countries must urgently:
1. Ramp up the supply and sharing of vaccines with developing countries. The IMF estimates that COVAX, a global effort to broaden vaccine coverage to poorer countries, will need approximately 1.75 billion doses to reach the 40 percent target in all countries by the end of the year.
2. Remove trade barriers on vaccines and related materials.
3. Save lives in the interim while vaccine supplies remain scarce by providing grant financing to close financing gaps, including an urgent appeal by the World Health Organization to help fight the Delta variant.
