Rich countries win in the race to vaccinate against the covid virus. Despite promises of cooperation to help the less fortunate, third-dose vaccine programs in several countries show that this rule applies: States donate only the vaccine doses that are left over. This is the harsh reality, made clear by the slow advancement of Covax, the program of CEPI, Gavi, WHO and UNICEF for sharing vaccines with the poorest countries that is being talked about so much these days, on the occasion of the General Assembly of United Nations.
The poorest countries. According to initial WHO estimates, Covax should have distributed two billion doses by the end of 2021, a distant goal given the current pace: at the time of writing, less than 300 million doses have been distributed to the poorest countries of all. the world. Italy, which had committed to donating 15 million doses by the end of 2021, is now at 2.4 million.
One of the big brakes on the Covax program, according to an article in The Conversation, was the stop on the export of vaccines imposed by India at the end of March to try to cope with a very powerful second wave by accelerating the national vaccination campaign: since then, the country exported just 20 million doses to Covax, with the result that three doses per hundred people were administered in Third World countries, compared to 120 per cent in industrialized Western countries.
The case of India. But blaming India for all the blame is not correct: it is understandable to want to advance the vaccination campaign in one’s own country before giving doses to those who cannot afford it. India has a very large population, and needs to vaccinate about a billion citizens in adulthood: it is supposed that it can reach immunization by the end of the year, but meanwhile, for now, only 206 million have received the double dose. of people, equal to 15% of the population.
The situation is quite different in Europe, where almost 72% of adults have completed the vaccination cycle. Here, talking about the third dose is premature, according to the WHO, which has repeatedly asked for the postponement of the reinforcement doses to the end of 2021. But its appeal fell on deaf ears: in mid-September Israel had already administered three million third doses , on 6.5 million vaccinable, and a fourth dose is already ventilated; in Italy the third shift began on 20 September, but for now limited to the most fragile subjects.
The more the virus circulates, the more it mutates. The director of the WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, asked not to exacerbate inequalities and to wait, for the third dose, until each country has vaccinated at least 40% of the population: what does not seem to be clear to Western countries, that they continue to think about their immunity, it is that leaving the virus free to circulate is counterproductive for everyone. The more SARS-CoV-2 spreads, the more it mutates, the more likely a new variant will emerge that evades vaccines. In short, if we don’t want to be altruistic, we should at least be smart.