A third of the global population is relying on India to deliver their Covid-19 vaccines, but the country is barely able to support itself.
The current Covid-19 outbreak in India is causing hospitals to be overwhelmed, oxygen levels to deplete, and death tolls to reach unfathomable numbers among the country’s 1.3 billion residents. Authorities are currently reporting up to 200,000 deaths a day, but most are saying that’s likely a huge underestimation.
The massive outbreak occurring in India is causing the country to prioritize vaccinating its own citizens, and ignore other scheduled exports of the vaccines to other underserved countries. Millions of doses which were initially expected to be shipped to parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America have now been indefinitely postponed.
Experts are claiming this is just one major example of global vaccine inequality which is leaving poorer countries completely in the dark when it comes to when they’ll be able to receive doses. This is bad for the entire world, as the longer we wait to help these countries, the longer the pandemic will occur and the more likely it is that some of the many Covid-19 variants will begin to take over.
“This is the worst fear out of everything we were worried about last year. Deciding to rely solely not just on one country — but one company in that country — was a ridiculous decision.”
Achal Prabhala, an Indian vaccine supply expert at the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for global access to medicines, claimed that “with the U.S. and other rich countries buying up most supplies of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines — both expensive and delicate shots — poorer countries turned to India.”
The Serum Institute of India is the world’s largest vaccine producer, and currently has a licensing agreement that makes it so it can produce the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine easily and cheaply. Last year the Institute signed a supply deal with COVAX, a global vaccine-sharing program, which claimed the company will deliver 1.8 billion vaccines to 92 low and middle income countries last year.
Prabhala and other experts have always claimed that this was an ambitious plan, and now that India is restricting their supply, their predictions are coming to life. “What’s happened was not only highly predictable — it was predicted. We have put so many eggs in one basket with vaccine manufacturing in India, unfortunately it was a huge strategic error to expect one country to produce vaccines for so much of the world,” said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of programs at Duke Global Health Innovation Center, an authority on Covid-19 vaccine supply data.
“COVAX is delivering fewer than 50 million vaccines worldwide — just a quarter of what it planned to distribute by the end of May.”
Countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have been begging foreign governments for assistance in vaccine supply and distribution. Many of these countries haven’t even hit 1% in terms of people who are fully vaccinated.
“India is now taking vaccines that have legally been contracted out to other parties. That’s not the same as what the US is doing right now, as they had always planned to gain a large quantity for itself – we did the same thing only much later on and with other people’s vaccines,” Prabhala explained in response to some experts who claimed India wasn’t to be blamed for the lack of supply.
Many are placing the blame directly on COVAX, however, since the company made the error of relying heavily on one drugmaker and one vaccine to keep up with the demand. A spokesperson for Gavi, one of COVAX’s partners, said in a statement that it “understood Indian vaccine production — for the next month at least — will be committed to protecting its own citizens while the country confronts a truly dreadful wave of the pandemic.”
In the meantime, COVAX will try to “diversify its vaccine portfolio and offer support to countries left waiting for doses, ensuring the second dose is administered within the required timeframe.” Overall, many experts agree, weather countries need to stop hoarding excessive doses and start helping these poorer countries directly if we want the entire world to reach a certain level of immunity.
Eric Mastrota is a Contributing Editor at The National Digest based in New York. A graduate of SUNY New Paltz, he reports on world news, culture, and lifestyle. You can reach him at eric.mastrota@thenationaldigest.com.
