Can vaccine distribution be made fairer?
- November 13, 2022
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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Can vaccine distribution be made fairer?
Subject : Science and tech
Context-
- The Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity 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 gotten at least one dose of the vaccine.
What is the Global Dashboard?
- The Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity is 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.
- It combines the latest data on the global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines with the most recent socio-economic information.
- It provides new, actionable insights and possibilities for policymakers to look into the implications of vaccine inequity for socioeconomic recovery, jobs and welfare.
What is vaccine equity?
- 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.
Vaccine Inequality-
- During the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccine production was insufficient to meet global demand. Many wealthy countries procure 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.
Vaccine Apartheid-
- WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus gave this term for 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).
- Low-income countries need to increase their health expenditure by 30-60% while High-income countries have to increase theirs by only 0.8%.
Efforts taken to reduce vaccine inequity-
- Efforts were initiated to waive the intellectual property protection for the COVID-19 range of therapeutics and vaccines, in order to ensure that affordability alone doesn’t determine availability.
- A waiver in the TRIPS agreement was proposed as a radical way to overcome the anticipated shortfalls. However, that did not come through.
- COVAX-
- COVID-19 Vaccine Delivery Partnership (COVAX), a collective international effort with ‘One Country Team’, ‘One Plan’, and ‘One Budget’ which was launched by WHO, UNICEF, and GAVI and the World Bank, to intensify country readiness and delivery support.
- It aimed at accelerating COVID-19 vaccination coverage in 34 low-coverage countries, along with their governments.
- COVAX has helped many countries access vaccines since its launch in January 2022, low-income countries (LICs) particularly continue to have difficulties in achieving a step change in vaccination rates.
Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance
- Created in 2000, Gavi is an international organisation – a global Vaccine Alliance, bringing together public and private sectors with the shared goal of creating equal access to new and underused vaccines for children living in the world’s poorest countries.
- Its core partners include the WHO, UNICEF, the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
- In June 2019, the Gavi Board approved a new five-year strategy (‘Gavi 5.0’) with a vision to ‘leave no-one behind with immunisation’ and a mission to save lives and protect people’s health by increasing equitable and sustainable use of vaccines.
Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations
- CEPI is a global partnership launched in 2017 to develop vaccines to stop future epidemics.
- CEPI was founded in Davos (Switzerland) by the governments of Norway and India, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and the World Economic Forum.