Vaccine Inequity

Context

The Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity, a joint effort by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO) and the University of Oxford with cooperation across the UN system, has put out recent data that justifies the vexatious core of the vaccine distribution programme: Only one in four people has been vaccinated with at least one dose in low and middle income countries as of November 9, 2022.
In comparison, in high income countries, three in four people have got at least one dose of the vaccine.

What is the Global Dashboard?

The Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity combines the latest data on the global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines with the most recent socio-economic information to illustrate why accelerating vaccine equity is not only critical to saving lives but also to driving a faster and fairer recovery from the pandemic with benefits for all.

What is vaccine equity?

Simply put, everyone in the world has the same access to vaccines. While the availability of drugs across the world continues to remain iniquitous, disadvantaging large swathes of people in low and middle income countries, it was hoped that the urgency of a pandemic might erase these differences, offering equal access to all. But that was not to be.
Many wealthy countries turned inwards, procuring vaccine doses through exclusive bilateral deals for their domestic populations (vaccine nationalism), and manufacturing countries, such as India, imposed temporary export bans. These events catalysed the global vaccine inequity that is still evident today.
Widening gaps in global vaccine equity have led to a two-track pandemic with booster COVID-19 vaccinations proliferating in high-income countries (HICs) and first doses not yet reaching all populations in low-income countries (LICs). WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus using the strongest of terms for this divide, called it: ‘Vaccine Apartheid’.
The Dashboard also points out another key factor: While vaccination programmes will increase healthcare costs across all countries, it is especially the case in low-income countries as they would need to increase their health expenditure by a staggering 30-60% to reach 70% of their population under the current pricing. High-income countries are expected to increase theirs by only 0.8% to achieve the same vaccination rate in one year.

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