More than half of Covid-19 vaccines administered so far have been in high-income countries, which account for just 15% of the world population. Four out of five doses are purchased outside COVAX, the UN-backed procurement scheme that had attempted to set up fair and equal access for all countries. The most successful vaccination campaigns, in the US, UK and Israel, were unabashed us-first operations. Has vaccine nationalism definitely won? I caught up with Tania Cernuschi, team lead for global access in the World Health Organization’s vaccine department, to understand how things got so unequal and whether there’s hope to change that. 

Show notes

00:27 Intro
02:36 The state of the worldwide vaccination campaign 
05:57 Why can poorer countries not access the vaccine?
09:22 Should rich countries be vaccinating their young people right now?
16:04 Should vaccines be made a public good?
19:55 When will enough of the world have been vaccinated?
23:27 A note on the AstraZeneca vaccine
24:17 What we should learn for the next crisis
26:06 Outro

Sources & credits

Here’s just how unequal the global coronavirus vaccine rollout has been, The Washington Post (with helpful interactive data visualization)
India is a warning, The Atlantic (26 April 2021)
'Vaccine prince': the Indian billionaire set to make Covid jabs for the UK, The Guardian (27 March 2021)
Why the UK doesn’t need a coronavirus vaccine export ban, Politico (20 March 2021)
Joe Biden hints U.S. could share more unused AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines, The Globe and Mail (21 April 2021)
American export controls threaten to hinder global vaccine production, The Economist (22 April 2021)

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