Distribution Note about the table in this section: number and percentage of people who have received at least one dose of a COVID19 vaccine (unless noted otherwise). May include vaccination of non-citizens, which can push totals beyond 100% of the local population. The table is updated daily by a bot. Access during the pandemic Countries have extremely unequal access to the COVID19 vaccine.
Vaccine equity has not been achieved or even approximated. The inequity has harmed both countries with poor access and countries with good access. , Belgium, February 2021 In March 2021, it was revealed that the US attempted to convince Brazil not to purchase the
Sputnik V COVID19 vaccine, fearing "Russian influence" in Latin America. Some nations involved in long-standing territorial disputes have reportedly had their access to vaccines blocked by competing nations;
Palestine has accused Israel of blocking vaccine delivery to
Gaza, while
Taiwan has suggested that China has hampered its efforts to procure vaccine doses. A single dose of the COVID19 vaccines by
AstraZeneca would cost 47
Egyptian pounds (EGP), and the authorities are selling them for between 100 and 200 EGP. A report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace cited the poverty rate in Egypt as around 29.7 percent, which constitutes approximately 30.5 million people, and claimed that about 15 million Egyptians would be unable to gain access to the luxury of vaccination. A human rights lawyer, Khaled Ali, launched a lawsuit against the government, forcing them to provide vaccinations free of charge to all members of the public. , India According to
immunologist Anthony Fauci, mutant strains of the virus and limited vaccine distribution pose continuing risks, and he said, "we have to get the entire world vaccinated, not just our own country." Edward Bergmark and
Arick Wierson are calling for a global vaccination effort and wrote that the wealthier nations' "me-first" mentality could ultimately backfire because the spread of the virus in poorer countries would lead to more variants, against which the vaccines could be less effective. In March 2021, the United States, Britain, European Union member states, and some other members of the
World Trade Organization (WTO) blocked a push by more than eighty developing countries to
waive COVID19 vaccine patent rights in an effort to boost production of vaccines for poor nations. On 5 May 2021, the
US government under President Joe Biden announced that it supports waiving intellectual property protections for COVID19 vaccines. The Members of the European Parliament have backed a motion demanding the temporary lifting of intellectual property rights for COVID19 vaccines. vaccine in Brazil in April 2021 In a meeting in April 2021, the World Health Organization's emergency committee addressed concerns of persistent inequity in global vaccine distribution. Although 9 percent of the world's population lives in the 29 poorest countries, these countries had received only 0.3% of all vaccines administered as of May 2021. In March 2021, Brazilian journalism agency
Agência Pública reported that the country vaccinated about twice as many people who declare themselves white than black and noted that mortality from COVID19 is higher in the black population. In May 2021,
UNICEF made an urgent appeal to industrialized nations to pool their excess COVID19 vaccine capacity to make up for a 125-million-dose gap in the
COVAX program. The program mostly relied on the
Oxford–AstraZeneca COVID‑19 vaccine produced by the
Serum Institute of India, which faced serious supply problems due to increased domestic vaccine needs in India from March to June 2021. Only a limited amount of vaccines can be distributed efficiently, and the shortfall of vaccines in South America and parts of Asia is due to a lack of expedient donations by richer nations. International aid organizations have pointed at Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives, as well as Argentina, Brazil, and some parts of the Caribbean, as problem areas where vaccines are in short supply. In mid-May 2021, UNICEF was also critical of the fact that most proposed donations of Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were not slated for delivery until the second half of 2021 or early in 2022. In July 2021, the heads of the World Bank Group, the International Monetary Fund, the World Health Organization, and the World Trade Organization said in a joint statement: "As many countries are struggling with new variants and a third wave of COVID19 infections, accelerating access to vaccines becomes even more critical to ending the pandemic everywhere and achieving broad-based growth. We are deeply concerned about the limited vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and support for deliveries available to developing countries." In July 2021,
The BMJ reported that countries had thrown out over 250,000 vaccine doses as supply exceeded demand and strict laws prevented the sharing of vaccines. A survey by
The New York Times found that over a million doses of vaccine had been thrown away in ten U.S. states because federal regulations prohibit recalling them, preventing their redistribution abroad. Furthermore, doses donated close to expiration often cannot be administered quickly enough by recipient countries and end up having to be discarded. To help overcome this problem, the Prime Minister of India,
Narendra Modi, announced that they would make their digital vaccination management platform,
CoWIN, open to the global community. He also announced that India would also release the source code for the contact tracing app
Aarogya Setu for developers around the world. Around 142 countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, the Maldives, Guyana, Antigua and Barbuda, St. Kitts and Nevis, and Zambia, expressed their interest in the application for COVID management.
Amnesty International and
Oxfam International have criticized the support of vaccine monopolies by the governments of producing countries, noting that this is dramatically increasing the dose price by five times and often much more, creating an economic barrier to access for poor countries.
Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors without Borders) has also criticized vaccine monopolies and repeatedly called for their suspension, supporting the
TRIPS waiver. The waiver was first proposed in October 2020 and has support from most countries, but was delayed by opposition from the EU (especially Germany; major EU countries such as France, Italy, and Spain support the exemption), the UK, Norway, and Switzerland, among others. MSF called for a Day of Action in September 2021 to put pressure on the
WTO Minister's meeting in November, which was expected to discuss the TRIPS
IP waiver. In August 2021, to reduce unequal distribution between rich and poor countries, the WHO called for a
moratorium on
booster doses at least until the end of September. However, in August, the United States government announced plans to offer booster doses eight months after the initial course to the general population, starting with priority groups. Before the announcement, the WHO harshly criticized this type of decision, citing the lack of evidence for the need for boosters, except for patients with specific conditions. At this time, vaccine coverage of at least one dose was 58% in high-income countries and only 1.3% in low-income countries, and 1.14 million Americans had already received an unauthorized booster dose. US officials argued that waning efficacy against mild and moderate disease might indicate reduced protection against severe disease in the coming months. Israel, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom have also started planning boosters for specific groups. In September 2021, more than 140 former world leaders and Nobel laureates, including former President of France
François Hollande, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
Gordon Brown, former Prime Minister of New Zealand
Helen Clark, and Professor
Joseph Stiglitz, called on the candidates to be the next German chancellor to declare themselves in favor of waiving intellectual property rules for COVID19 vaccines and transferring vaccine technologies. In November 2021, nursing unions in 28 countries filed a formal appeal with the United Nations over the refusal of the UK, EU, Norway, Switzerland, and Singapore to temporarily waive patents for COVID19 vaccines. During his first international trip, the
President of Peru,
Pedro Castillo, spoke at the
seventy-sixth session of the United Nations General Assembly on 21 September 2021, proposing the creation of an international
treaty signed by world leaders and
pharmaceutical companies to guarantee universal vaccine access, arguing that "The battle against the pandemic has shown us the failure of the international community to cooperate under the principle of solidarity." Optimizing the societal benefit of vaccination may benefit from a strategy that is tailored to the state of the pandemic, the demographics of a country, the age of the recipients, the availability of vaccines, and the individual risk for severe disease. Many countries are starting to give an additional booster shot to the immunosuppressed and the elderly, and research predicts an additional benefit of personalizing vaccine doses in the setting of limited vaccine availability when a wave of virus Variants of Concern hits a country. Despite the extremely rapid development of effective
mRNA and
viral vector vaccines,
vaccine equity has not been achieved. An additional 6 billion vaccinations may be needed to fill vaccine access gaps, particularly in developing countries. Given the projected availability of newer vaccines, the development and use of
whole inactivated virus (WIV) and protein-based vaccines are also recommended. Organizations such as the
Developing Countries Vaccine Manufacturers Network could help to support the production of such vaccines in developing countries, with lower production costs and greater ease of deployment. While vaccines substantially reduce the probability and severity of infection, it is still possible for fully vaccinated people to contract and spread COVID19. Public health agencies have recommended that vaccinated people continue using preventive measures (wear face masks, social distance, wash hands) to avoid infecting others, especially vulnerable people, particularly in areas with high community spread. Governments have indicated that such recommendations will be reduced as vaccination rates increase and community spread declines.
Economics Vaccine inequity damages the global economy, disrupting the global
supply chain. High-income countries would profit an estimated US$4.80 for every $1 spent on giving vaccines to lower-income countries. The
International Monetary Fund sees the vaccine divide between rich and poor nations as a serious obstacle to a global economic recovery. Vaccine inequity disproportionately affects refuge-providing states, as they tend to be poorer, and refugees and displaced people are economically more vulnerable even within those low-income states, so they have suffered more economically from vaccine inequity. == Technology-assisted vaccine hunting ==