How Vaccine Nationalism Risks Prolonging the Pandemic

Early arrangements to secure supplies of Covid-19 vaccines are paying off for the likes of Israel, Britain, the U.S., and the European Union, the bloc’s relatively sluggish rollout notwithstanding. But much of the world is still waiting for anything beyond a trickle of the life-saving doses. Public-health specialists warn that uneven access to the vaccines will prolong the pandemic, bringing more suffering and economic pain in a way that exacerbates global inequality.

Health experts say the fastest route to controlling the pandemic would have involved deploying Covid vaccines in the most efficient way possible. In an ideal world, the first doses would have gone to groups at the highest risk -- such as medical workers, nursing-home staffers and the elderly -- everywhere across the globe before supplies were used by the most privileged countries to start vaccinating whole populations. Researchers at Northeastern University in Boston calculated that the monopolization of vaccines by wealthy nations -- what’s known as “vaccine nationalism” -- could result in almost twice as many deaths globally as distributing them equally. Allowing the SARS-CoV-2 virus to remain rampant in some parts of the world gives it more scope to develop additional dangerous variants, which will inevitably make their way elsewhere and may not be neutralized by existing vaccines.