Covid-19 vaccines, because millions of doses go to waste

Even the Canada he found himself in a situation equal to that of Switzerland. In recent months it has sent to the pulp 13.6 million doses from AstraZeneca, which is over half of all AstraZeneca servings she has ever bought. In the spring he had had to do the same with others 1.2 million doses. How writes the British Medical Journal, “The country attracted criticism at the start of the pandemic as one of the buyers and accumulators of vaccines more aggressive among rich countries “. In fact, when development of more vaccines started, Canada signed agreements that reserved the country until 500 million doses of seven different potential vaccines, this in the face of a single population 38 million people. As if that were not enough, the country he also got in the toughest phases of the pandemic four million doses since Covax systemdesigned in theory to distribute vaccines to the poorest countries. Many of those doses have now expired and will be destroyed, while in the countries of the Covax circuit there continue to be problems of availability.

The program to provide Covid-19 vaccines to low-income countries is well below its targets

Delivered one billion doses. That is half of those initially planned, while in 88 countries around the world less than 40% of the population has been vaccinated and in another 36 less than 10%

Vaccine inequalities

The industrialized countries at the time when vaccines were developed tried to grab everything that could be grabbed, beyond what were the actual needs. The vaccine rush has thus resulted in a huge one waste of doses, as the Swiss and Canadian cases show. As the American magazine wrote Quartz already in August 2021, the rich nations they received enough doses to vaccinate four times their population. Elsewhere, however, this is not the case.

According to the data of the African Union, only the 22.7% of the continent’s population has completed the vaccination cycle. In some countries this percentage drops further: in Niger it stands at 6.5%, in Madagascar at 5.4%, in Burundi even 0.2% in this case by effect even a certain one hesitation in the government and in the population in starting the vaccination campaign.

Pharmaceutical companies and industrialized countries themselves have appealed to this motivation when the serious data on inequality in the purchases of doses and administrations had to be justified. “There is no doubt that the narrative of hesitation about vaccines from poorer countries is ingrained in racism and colonialism and in the idea that some people don’t know how to do certain things “, said Fifa Rahman, health consultant at Matahari Global Solutions. The latter together with the People’s Vaccine Alliance and the International Treatment Preparedness Coalition (Itpc) He has made a report which shows how the vaccination deficit in poor countries is a consequence of inadequate suppliesbut also of one poor adaptability vaccines in their storage and administration in the most difficult contexts.

In short, most of the doses were created tailored to the rich country and it is no coincidence that they ended up almost entirely in the richest countries. Now that countries like the United States declared the pandemic ended, with the consequence that they will not buy anymore vaccines, perhaps something could change in the vaccination of the poorest areas of the world.