The Great Covid Vaccine Stockpile

It’s no surprise to know that rich countries spout empty rhetoric and in reality, they are just plain selfish. 

According to Human Rights Watch, 75% of Covid vaccines have gone to 10 countries. The Economist Intelligence Unit have calculated that half of all of the vaccines made so far have gone to 15% of the world's population, the world's richest countries administering 100 times as many shots as the poorest. 

In June, members of the G7 – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States – pledged to donate one billion doses to poor countries over the next year. 

Read this interesting comment from Agathe Demarais (left), lead author at the Economist Intelligence Unit and a former diplomat: "I smiled when I saw that. I used to see this a lot. You know it's never going to happen"! 

The UK promised 100m of that pledge, so far it has donated just under nine million. Joe Biden pledged 580m of which the US has delivered 140m so far. And the EU bloc promised 250m doses by the end of the year – it has sent about 8% of those. 

And who can forget the storm of derision that greeted the US of A when it announced a donation of 80 vials of vaccine to Trinidad and Tobago, a country of 1.4 million people in June?!

Even Covax, the global scheme supported by the WHO to get doses where they're needed most has supply issues. 

Covax purchases and then sells vaccines at low-cost to middle income countries and donates to poor countries. It planned to distribute two billion doses in 2021 with most of them coming from a facility in India but when a second wave of infections crippled India in May, the government issued an export ban. 

Since then, Covax has relied on doses donated by rich countries. And supply has been slow, some of the receiving countries have yet to vaccinate 2% of their population. It's not a global supply problem. 

Rich countries have been building up surpluses of vaccines, according to Airfinity, a science analytics company researching global supply. Vaccine manufacturers are now making 1.5bn doses every month, 11bn will have produced by the end of the year. The world's richest countries could have 1.2bn doses that they don't need – even if they start administering boosters. 

Dr. Matt Linley (right), lead researcher at Airfinity had even made the claim that a fifth of those doses – 241 million vaccines – could be at risk of going to waste if they are not donated very soon. 

"I don't think it was necessarily rich countries being greedy, it's more that they didn't know which vaccines would work", says Dr Linley. "So they had to purchase several of them". 

With their latest research Airfinity hope to show governments that there is a healthy supply of vaccines and that they don't need to keep surpluses. Instead they can donate what they don't need now and be confident that more doses will be produced in the coming months. 

So far, we've heard only empty words from these rich countries – but it’s still not too late to translate words into action.