Getting the Vaccine: COVAX and Other Options

In an earlier blog, I talked of the rich country – poor country divide when it comes to getting the COVID-19 vaccine. In that, there was one chart on the number of doses pre-ordered per citizen for various countries. Here is a chart of the total number of doses ordered by countries, in decreasing order:

It’s good to see India is 2nd on the list. But did you notice the fourth row named COVAX? You’ve heard of EU, SAARC, ASEAN, but what is COVAX?

 

To answer that, you need some background. It doesn’t help if some countries get vaccinated while others don’t, because the virus will just spread again. While everyone understands that point, it is politically impossible for any country to care about other countries over themselves. Hence, COVAX:

“It is the only truly global solution to this pandemic because it is the only effort to ensure that people in all corners of the world will get access to COVID-19 vaccines once they are available, regardless of their wealth.”

 

As I said before, no country wants to put all its eggs in one vaccine basket. After all, (1) Who knows which vaccine will work better?,  (2) What if a vaccine company fails to ramp up production? Ergo, this is what the vaccine company to country “match the following” looks like:

Notice how the British vaccine is the biggest supplier to India, the EU, COVAX, and the US? While Pfizer may be grabbing all the headlines, they’re 4th on the overall production list. Nor is Pfizer’s share of even the US that huge. All of this is a consequence of production capacities of the different companies. You get India’s production capacity, you become the largest producer for the world.

 

And this brings us to the other use of COVAX, even for some higher income countries:

“A number of higher-income self-financing countries that have no bilateral deals with manufacturers, COVAX is… the only viable way in which their citizens will get access to COVID-19 vaccines.”

 

So yes, COVAX is a very good and necessary institution indeed. I do wonder though as to how they intend to allocate vaccines to different countries on their list? And how do they decide which of those countries gets which vaccine? Of course, I have the same question for the EU as well.

 

And then there are some countries with low populations who will almost certainly get the vaccine because of their geopolitical importance. Like Israel (from the US). And I suspect, Maldives and Nepal (from India or China or both).

 

It will take all kinds of measures for countries to get the vaccines…

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