COVID-19 demands a new global response

As temperatures fall in the West with another difficult autumn and winter pandemic season ahead, the debate is hotting up over global vaccines distribution with many developing countries still having low vaccination rates.

Former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown turbocharged the issue, rightly asserting that scarcity of vaccines in poor countries was not just a moral failure, but also could come back to haunt the West given the prospect of new mutant variants of the virus emerging. About 70 percent of people in the West are now vaccinated, but only 2 percent in Africa, while hundreds of millions of doses lie in warehouses in Europe and North America.

Prof. Sir Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, which developed the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab, said the world needed to “turn the tap on” to fight the “fire” of coronavirus internationally. It is not only that the West had a moral obligation to vaccinate other countries but, as his Pollard’s colleague Prof. Dame Sarah Gilbert also argued, booster third jabs in the West should be given only to the elderly and those with weakened immune systems. This intervention is important, coming amid rows in many Western countries over whether there should be mass booster jabs.

So just as many hoped that vaccine shortages in the developing world would be eased, plans to offer boosters mean that a lot more vaccine doses have to be obtained and stored in the West. This extends the time needed for the rest of the world to catch up, meaning many thousands of people or even tens of thousands will die.

And the global emergency is not only in healthcare. Education in a quarter of countries at risk of collapse due to the pandemic’s impact. The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread with the UN estimating that, for the first time in history, about 1.5 billion children were out of school during the pandemic, with at least a third unable to access remote learning, threatening a “lost generation of learners” with all the social, political and economic fallout that could ensue in coming years.

There is not just a moral rationale for ending the global vaccine chasm, but also a compelling economic case. In June, the heads of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group, World Health Organisation and World Trade Organisation issued an extraordinary call for $50 billion of investment in vaccines to generate $9 trillion in global economic returns by 2025. In so doing, they argued, the ambition of the WHO to vaccinate about 30 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 could be boosted to 40 per cent, and at least 60 percent by the first half of 2022.

To be sure, there is some movement. The G7 leaders committed in June to provide one billion vaccine doses for low and low-middle income countries over the next year, but the WHO says this falls far short of the 11 billion vaccine doses needed.

With the UK playing a world leadership role in 2021, not just with its presidency of the G7 but also COP 26, London should be leading the world on this agenda given that so much of the UK population has been vaccinated already. To translate this to the global picture, the UK has given almost as many doses to its own citizens as the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access program has been able to ship to 120 countries in dire need of jabs.

UK Cabinet minister Oliver Dowden insisted London could help to jab the world while delivering a domestic booster program. He noted that the UK was committed to 100 million jabs by 2022, and had already delivered nine million.

Positive as these commitments are, however, the UK government must do much more alongside its international partners. The impact of creating what is in effect a sterilised wedge from the rest of the world is not just unjust, but also potentially self-defeating given the possibility of vaccine-resistant variants.

At the 18-month point of the pandemic, there is now an urgent need for an increasingly global response to the continuing challenge it poses. The more policymakers act on a key lesson of the crisis — that no one is safe until everyone is safe — the faster the crisis may pass and the world can move into the “new normal” that comes next.

• Andrew Hammond is an Associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics