Covax and why you can’t charity your way out of a pandemic
Covax, the United Nations-backed Covid-19 immunization program, was supposed to vaccinate the world. But 18 months after its much heralded launch, it is now safe to call it a flop, if not an outright failure.
The program is responsible for just 5% of all vaccines administered globally and an astonishing 98% of people in low-income countries are yet to receive a single shot. That’s according to a new investigation by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, STAT, El País, and Ojo Público, which reviewed confidential internal documents and interviewed officials from more than two dozen countries involved with Covax. I really recommend going through the investigation in full, but here are the main takeaways:
- A number of the targets set by Covax appear wildly unrealistic. In the past 18 months, the program has delivered just 330 million vaccines, yet it says that in the next three months it will deliver 1.1 billion doses.
- In some countries, including Niger and Sudan, when vaccines eventually arrived, some were close to expiration or were delivered without syringes or other equipment needed to administer them.
- While Covax had intended to use multiple vaccine manufacturers, it ended up ordering 75% of initial doses from a single company in India, millions of which were delayed when the country blocked vaccine exports. “Because of Covax’s decision to put all their eggs into one basket, people did die,” said one expert.
- Wealthy nations have pledged 785 million doses to Covax for allocation to poorer countries by September, however only 18% of them have arrived.
- “You can’t charity your way out of a pandemic,” Kate Elder of Medecins Sans Frontières said of Covax’s strategy of counting on donors to cover costs.
"That country club mindset needs to change,” said one health expert, saying that Covax’s “foundational flaw” was a lack of interest in listening to the needs of lower and middle-income countries.
The report describes a program mired in chaos and miscommunication, with vaccine shipments arriving months late to countries, which led to delayed immunizations, and, in some cases, fueled misinformation. “Because the vaccines were delayed,” a Nigerian health official told reporters, “those conspiracy theories became more widespread.”