- more than 60% of the world’s population — 4.8 billion people — have received at least one dose of one of more than 20 different COVID-19 vaccines.
- there are still huge inequities in access, with just 5.5% of people in low-income nations having received two doses.
- Some scientists caution that this continued inequity increases the risk of new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging from poorly vaccinated populations.
Since vaccines began rolling out vaccines in late 2020 and 2021 more than 60% of the world’s population has been at least partially vaccinated while many low incomed countries face inequality in the vaccination drive, reports The nature.
The vaccination drive in the world
In little more than a year, ten billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered globally, in what has become the largest vaccination programme in history.
Many nations began rolling out vaccines in late 2020 and early 2021, and since then more than 60% of the world’s population — 4.8 billion people — have received at least one dose of one of more than 20 different COVID-19 vaccines that have been approved by nations for use around the world.
“The world has never seen such rapid scale-up of a new life-saving technology,” says Amanda Glassman, executive vice-president of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC. “The effort underway is inspiring.”
But — as researchers warned last year when the first one billion doses had been administered — there are still huge inequities in access, with just 5.5% of people in low-income nations having received two doses.
Catching up with the high and middle income nations
By contrast, many of the world’s high- and middle-income nations are now pushing ahead with programmes to deliver third, or even fourth doses, with these boosters currently making up around one-third of all COVID-19 vaccine doses administered each day worldwide.
Some scientists caution that this continued inequity increases the risk of new SARS-CoV-2 variants emerging from poorly vaccinated populations.
“As an African, the real significance of reaching ten billion vaccines administered is the extreme inequity that exists in vaccine distribution between the global north and global south,” says Mosoka Fallah, founder of Refuge Place International, a public-health organization headquartered in Bassa Town, Liberia. “Until we correct this inequity, the world will continue to see new variants.”
At present, just 16% of people across the entire African continent have received even one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Wealthy nations have been donating surplus vaccine doses to low-income nations, but Fallah says that if patents were to be waived on existing vaccines — an issue that is currently the subject of debate at the World Trade Organization in Geneva, Switzerland — it would allow more countries to make their own vaccines, increasing supply.
Despite these issues and the challenges with distribution, reaching the milestone of ten billion doses “is an unprecedented global moment,” says Soumya Swaminathan, chief scientist of the World Health Organization, based in Geneva. “It is a huge scientific achievement that ten billion doses of vaccines to a new pathogen were developed in two years from its identification.”
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Source: The nature
