THE STANDARD By
Ravi Kumar |
December 22nd 2020 at 00:00:00 GMT +0300
With the Covid-19 pandemic still raging and the prospect of a cold, socially distanced winter looming ahead, all of us are hoping that our jobs, businesses, schools and social lives will soon return to some semblance of normalcy.
Universally, there’s the belief that the availability of a vaccine will break the spell and we can finally rid ourselves of our masks. But the last mile from ‘vaccine’ to ‘vaccination’ must be trekked before our world can truly start to become safe, and that journey is fraught with challenges.
Some of these problems, though complex, are well-defined – like connecting the dots between vaccine providers, distributors and consumers, nurturing a cold supply chain framework or even streamlining the broad spectrum of vaccine management from prioritisation and administration, all the way to adverse effect monitoring.
India orders 1 5 billion doses of COVID vaccines dailynews.lk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailynews.lk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Speed read
Recent analysis shows no country in Sub-Saharan Africa has such a deal in place
Unequal distribution of vaccines could hurt the global fight against the pandemic
Share this article:
Republish
We encourage you to republish this article online and in print, it’s free under our creative commons attribution license, but please follow some simple guidelines:
You have to credit our authors.
You have to credit SciDev.Net where possible include our logo with a link back to the original article.
You can simply run the first few lines of the article and then add: “Read the full article on SciDev.Net” containing a link back to the original article.
This is viewer supported news. Please do your part today.Donate
Health experts are raising concerns that wealthy countries have reserved enough coronavirus vaccine doses to immunize their populations multiple times over, while poorer countries may only have enough to vaccinate about 20%. Reuters reports the World Health Organization’s global plan for delivering COVID-19 vaccines to 91 poor and middle-income countries faces a “very high” risk of failure and could leave billions of people with no access to vaccines until 2024. “What we see is that something like 90% of all the vaccine doses that have been purchased have actually been done directly by countries, mostly middle-income and high-income countries,” says Dr. Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, who has been tracking COVID-19 vaccine purchases around the world. “What we are seeing is a lot of side deals, in essence, where people are trying to also ensure that they are
Giant self-proclaimed “great” nations like America and Russia are not only disgustingly selfish for not intending to help low-income countries with tackling a pandemic (as the term is for this global ordeal). Those selfish rich nations are also rather dumb to not foresee the re-occurring of the virus in their own nations when the virus comes in from those countries they do not wish to help. Duh ?
Stuart Mills says:
Some of the mentioned (slightly blackballed in the article) high-income countries have already stated to donate a load of their orders to low-income countries (Canada, France and the EU being the first declared donators). Donated supply may go directly, or via the COVAX plan of the WHO. Also big international already seasoned organizations like Rotary International) could tie Covid vaccinations in with their enormous global other (polio) succesful vaccination drives, with experienced logistics. The WHO should work with the multiple good-willing playing partners,