COVAX: Why Biden's billions won't fix Covid vaccine inequality worldwide

President Joe Biden last week announced $4 billion for a humanitarian program called COVAX — short for Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access plan — which aims to fairly distribute vaccines between rich countries and the developing world.

But in more than a dozen interviews, current and former officials involved with COVAX and experts with detailed knowledge of the plan suggest Biden's mountains of cash and rhetorical support will not address the real reasons behind the dire state of global vaccine inequality.

and other rich countries.

giving no vaccines at all to it giving $4 billion — but that doesn't go far enough," Sharifah Sekalala, an associate professor of global health law at England's University of Warwick, said.

Seeing an oncoming wave of vaccine nationalism last year, the world's leading humanitarian groups responded by founding COVAX, a partnership among the World Health Organization, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance.

While 20 percent of Americans have already been vaccinated, COVAX is months behind.

"It is quite bizarre for a young person in one part of the world to be getting the vaccine, while a front-line health worker in Africa is still waiting.".

COVAX could have all the cash in the world, but so few vaccine vials are being made that the shots are not available to buy.

Those that have trickled out of the spigot have mostly been snapped up by rich countries first — and in this sense, Biden's White House is little different.

Without naming names, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that rich countries had actually prevented COVAX from accessing its own supply.

That goes against the express pleas of COVAX and other experts, who want the sharing to start as soon as rich countries have immunized priority groups.

Sharing immediately is not only "the right thing to do from a humanitarian perspective, it is in the interest of rich countries to stop transmission everywhere," said Dr.

Tom Kenyon, a former director of the CDC's Center for Global Health and the former CDC director for Ethiopia, now chief health officer at Project HOPE, an international global health organization.

Given the political pressures, "vaccine nationalism is at the same time ethically indefensible and probably politically inevitable," said Justine Landegger, a senior vaccine consultant at Resolve to Save Lives, which is working with African countries to prepare for their rollouts.

By contrast, COVAX took months to raise enough cash to enter negotiations with drugmakers.

It was essentially saying: "'I understand that you can sell these vaccines for three times their price, but I actually want a discount and I want a lot of them,'" said Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for global access to medicines.

Aylward at the WHO recalls seeing the deals struck by rich countries and thinking, "Wow, you are paying three four times as much — these countries were desperate.".

It's also ahead on sharing, donating 10 million vaccines through COVAX itself.

Senior COVAX officials remain bullish about hitting their 1.8 billion vaccine target this year, covering 3.3 percent of those populations.

"We don't buy it," said Andrea Taylor, assistant director of Duke Global Health Innovation Center, an authority on Covid-19 vaccine supply data.

The forecast assumes COVAX will be able to obtain almost every dose made this year by the Serum Institute of India, the world's biggest vaccine supplier by volume.

In any case, the officials running COVAX are more eager to talk about the bigger picture

And even after its sluggish and troubled start, vaccinating poor countries 12 months after the pandemic was declared looks like lightspeed when compared with any other global immunization program in history