Almost twice as many people will die from Covid-19 if rich countries buy up the first 2-billion doses of vaccine instead of ensuring the shots are fairly distributed, Microsoft founder Bill Gates has warned.
A safe and effective vaccine is critical to ending the coronavirus pandemic. More than 29-million cases and 924,000 deaths have been recorded so far, and many countries that initially appeared to have brought their epidemics under control are grappling with a resurgence of the disease.
“I feel almost certain ... that by early next year we’ll have a number of vaccines, and then the question will be ‘how much can we manufacture, and how do we get them out to the ones most in need?’ Misallocating the vaccine would cause dramatic additional deaths,” said Gates.
The US-based Northeastern University’s laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-technical Systems found 33% of the Covid-19 deaths expected in the absence of a vaccine could be averted if the first 2-billion out of 3-billion doses of an 80% effective shot were distributed to 50 high-income countries. If all 3-billion doses were distributed to all nations in proportion to their populations, 61% of the deaths could be averted.
“No-one is saying that there shouldn’t be any recognition of where the trials are done [and] where the R&D funding has come from, but the way to deal with this problem is to have [manufacturing] capacity be as large as possible,” Gates said in a briefing ahead of the release of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s latest Goalkeepers Report, which tracks progress towards the UN sustainable development goals.
The foundation supports the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator and its key vaccine partners, the vaccine alliance Gavi, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness, which provides direct support to vaccine developers and is co-ordinating efforts to enable a vaccine developed by one company to be manufactured in parallel by others. It aims to produce 2-billion doses of safe and effective vaccine by the end of 2021.
Rich countries should help buy vaccines for poor countries, not only for altruistic reasons but also because they would remain at risk from the virus if it continued to circulate in other parts of the world, said Gates.
The manufacturing costs are likely to be about $2-$3 a dose. The investment case was clear, he said, since the costs of manufacturing and distributing a Covid-19 vaccine would be far less than the economic damage wrought by the virus. The pandemic costs the global economy $500bn a month, according to the Goalkeepers Report.
It details how Covid-19 has derailed progress towards the sustainable development goals, throwing 37-million more people into extreme poverty (an increase of 7%) and knocking immunisation coverage back to levels last seen in the 1990s.
Routine immunisation coverage rose from 70% to 84% in the past 25 years, and is now back at 70%, said Gates, describing it as a huge setback. Even short-term disruptions to vaccination programmes for diseases like measles could lead to a surge in illness and death.
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