Vaccinate the world

... if you want to be safe at home

A nightmare scenario haunts the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination campaign. What if large parts of the world fail to vaccinate their people? It will inevitably lead to mutant strains resistant to the current vaccines entering the U.S., spreading rapidly and putting us back to square one in fighting the pandemic.

According to NPR, the Biden administration today will announce a $4 billion grant to COVAX, the joint venture between the World Health Organization and Gavi, the vaccine alliance funded largely by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The goal of Gavi’s $7 billion fundraising campaign is to vaccinate 20% of the population living in 92 countries.

Imagine what the reaction here would be if the U.S. government set a goal of vaccinating 20% of the population in half the states, which is the rough equivalent of the COVAX goal. Public health officials would be outraged. Experts say vaccines need to reach anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of the population to achieve herd immunity.

A global pandemic requires global solutions. Yet there’s been almost no attention paid in the U.S. to the vaccine shortage outside the advanced industrial world.

Mutant strains of SARS-CoV-2 have emerged in the United Kingdom and South Africa. They are already spreading here and their susceptibility to existing vaccines remains unknown. If the pandemic continues to rage unchecked in large parts of the world, it will inevitably lead to the emergence of mutant strains resistant to all current vaccines.

The only solution is to gear up production of current vaccines on a massive scale so healthcare organizations in every country on earth can reach at least two-thirds of their populations. As things stand now, just 10 advanced countries have administered about 75% of the 200 million doses of the vaccines distributed worldwide. More than 130 countries have yet to receive or administer their first dose.

At a special virtual session of the United Nations on Wednesday, Secretary-General António Guterres said it was “unfair” that so few countries controlled the bulk of the world’s vaccine supply. “Vaccine equity is the biggest moral test before the global community.”

This is a case where equity is a necessity. The world’s capacity for manufacturing vaccines must be mobilized.

Facilities exist in many countries around the world to produce vaccines. India and South Africa, in particular, have large generic drug and vaccine manufacturing facilities that can be pressed into service. What they lack is the technical specifications for producing the current crop of vaccines and the rights to produce them. The patents belong to Pfizer, AstraZeneca, J&J and their partners, even though the technology was invented in government-funded labs and developed with taxpayer-financed grants.

Nearly 100 countries and a coalition of non-governmental organizations including Doctors Without Borders is pushing the World Trade Organization to grant an emergency waiver of its IP rules. That’s required before generic vaccine makers around the world can get the rights and access to the know-how to rapidly scale up vaccine production.

As things stand now, “intellectual property rights constitute a very substantial barrier for us to achieve this global goal of having people vaccinated,” said Mustaqeem De Gama, the South African counselor to the World Trade Organization. “We need a better system for reacting to global pandemics.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) said yesterday that the U.S. is still using its clout at the WTO to delay granting a waiver of its TRIPS (trade-related aspects of intellectual property) rules. When she raised the issue at Democratic Party caucus meeting on Wednesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “chimed in to say how important it was that this waiver go through, that the U.S. not stand in the way.”

“This needs to happen quickly so these variants don’t have a chance to multiply,” Schakowsky said.

“This will not only be a shot in the arm of everyone who needs it,” added De Gama. “It will be a shot in the arm of the world economy.”

You can learn more about the campaign to ramp up global manufacturing of vaccines here, here and here.

And you can write your Congressman today asking them to back a resolution asking President Biden to throw U.S. support behind efforts at the WTO to grant a waiver of the TRIPS rules that are preventing the immediate ramp-up of worldwide manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines.

You can find easily find your Congressman’s website and contact information for writing letters here.