In the pandemic’s early days, there was much high-minded talk about vaccine equity. “No one is safe until everyone is safe,” the international bodies and philanthropic organizations correctly observed. Covax, a multibillion-dollar program bankrolled by nonprofits and global health bodies, aimed to leverage massive buying power to ensure poor nations’ timely access to vaccine doses. Rich countries proceeded to slow-walk delivery of their financial pledges to Covax, limiting its ability to ink timely deals. At the same time, wealthy nations engaged in a bidding war for first dibs on doses, pushing up the price pharmaceutical companies felt comfortable charging the philanthropic endeavor.
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In July, the International Monetary Fund estimated vaccinating “at least 40 percent of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and at least 60 percent by the first half of 2022” would cost roughly $50 billion. That price has proven too steep for the wealthy world. Even the United States — whose humanitarian impulses ostensibly led it to invest $2 trillion into “democracy promotion” in Afghanistan — has declined to cough up a significant fraction of that sum. Today, vaccinating 40 percent of every country by year’s end looks utopian. According to the World Health Organization, only nine African countries have vaccinated 10 percent of their people.
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The United States has contributed more to the global vaccination drive than any other country, but our contributions have nevertheless been paltry, especially when viewed in light of our resources. America did donate 500 million Pfizer doses to low-income countries. Yet the Biden administration financed that donation by diverting hundreds of millions of dollars that it had previously pledged for vaccination drives in those countries, according to the New York Times.
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America’s efforts to expand global vaccine production have also been lackluster. A group of 116 congressional Democrats has called for adding to the party’s $3.5 trillion spending bill a $34 billion investment in global COVID vaccine manufacturing. The White House has yet to approve. Meanwhile, despite America’s official support for waiving patents on COVID vaccines, it has done little to pressure Pfizer and Moderna into transferring their technology to other countries with spare vaccine production capacity, such as
South Korea.
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