Today is one year to the day that the first person in the world, the UK’s own Margaret Keenan in Coventry, received an approved COVID-19 vaccine. But one year later many of the world’s most vulnerable are still waiting for their first dose.
One year to the day that we received our first ray of hope – amidst a dark winter at the end of a long and harrowing year, our first glimpse of an end to the pandemic. Yet here we are. A year later a new variant is spreading, and rumours of a new lockdown are rising. So how did we get here?
The beginning of that story lies in the privilege of hope, a gift that we were given and others were denied.
How did we get here?
Since that first dose on 8th December 2020, over 8 billion doses have been administered globally and 55% of the global population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. However, only 6.3% of people in low-income countries have received just one dose.
That leaves 93% without even their first dose. This means frontline healthcare workers and the most vulnerable people have been left without the protection they desperately need. This year too many people have died, despite us having the means to protect them. Why is this?
Rich countries have hoarded vaccines, with around 80% of supply having gone to high and upper-middle income countries. At the same time, global vaccine manufacturing capacity has fallen woefully short and yet wealthy governments have blocked efforts to improve it, such as WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (CTAP) and the TRIPS waiver. Finally, the last lifeline – the WHO hosted Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) – has been left consistently underfunded with a 2021 funding gap of $23.2bn.
In short, we have seen one pandemic but two realities. As vaccination has spurred a return to normalcy for us, many of the world’s most vulnerable have been left to suffer.
What is the impact?
These failures are creating a more deprived and dangerous world for children to live in, threatening decades of progress on health, nutrition, education, and economic development.
Experts have warned for months that nobody is safe until everyone is safe and that we will reap what we sow when new, deadlier, and more viral variants arrive on our shores.
We have left the rest of the world in ideal conditions for new variants to emerge. The challenges we face in the UK today with a new variant, just as with the Delta variant before, were not inevitable. They are the failures of narrow-minded and short-sighted policy decisions from high-income countries like our own.
Is there a way out?
Yes! We are not sharing this with you to drive us all further into a pit of wintery despair, but as a reminder that we can still choose a different path.
But that means taking urgent action now. It means taking overdue decisions and sweeping away the narrow mindset of vaccine nationalism. We need world leaders to urgently prioritise the 4 Ds:
- Doses: urgently redistribute the doses high-income countries have stockpiled, which may expire and go to waste, and get them to where they are needed most.
- Dollars: step up and cover the funding gap. Meet their financial pledges and go further.
- Domestic manufacturing: pull out all the stops to improve local capacity in regions. Support C-TAP and stop blocking the TRIPS waiver supported by over 100 countries including the US – the UK and EU are effectively the final blockers.
- Domestic systems: joined up thinking to finance and support the fragile health systems that need to deliver these vaccines, rather than falsely blaming those countries for ‘hesitancy’.
If you want to read more about any of these, you can in our report from earlier in the year: A Chance To Get It Right.
This is an on-going emergency and, unless we do everything we can to end the pandemic, millions of children will continue to suffer.
If world leaders continue as they have been - talking the talk but not walking the walk - we may find ourselves here again next year: facing a new variant and staring into the depths of an uncertain winter.
