protecting global interests. Nations such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Japan secured enough vaccines for multiple times their population long before the pharmaceutical companies were done with their clinical trials. While nearly 20 million of Canada’s shots sat in freezers for months and eventually expired, most African countries had hardly vaccinated 5% of their population due to inaccessibility. To reach a better equilibrium of immunity, COVAX was established in April 2020. COVAX is an alliance between major medical and aid organizations (such as WHO and UNICEF) to ensure equal access to COVID-19 testing, treatment, and vaccination globally. COVAX coordinates vaccine and monetary donations from wealthy countries and helps distribute these vaccines to the underdeveloped world. COVAX’s attempt to improve vaccine equality has been largely unsuccessful; it intended to provide two billion doses to underdeveloped and developing countries by December 2021, a goal that was only half achieved. Underdeveloped nations rejected over 100 million doses in December alone for two main reasons. First, many of the vaccines received were expired or nearing their expiry date, leaving insufficient time for distribution. Second, these nations do not have the infrastructure to distribute massive amounts of vaccines with short shelf lives before they expire. WHO adviser Dr. Peter Singer provided the following analogy: “If I was delivering a bottle of milk to you every day… you drank that bottle of milk. If one day I showed up, without any warning, with 100 bottles of milk that expired at midnight, you wouldn’t be able THE OBSERVER
to drink them.” COVAX is not entirely innocent in their failed equality campaign. The organization has been accused of essentially being a PR stunt, failing to properly coordinate shipments and facilitate communication between the donating and receiving countries. COVAX’s model of solving vaccine equality via collecting vaccine and monetary donations was doomed to fail from the start. Unusable vaccines and a general lack of funds are hardly the primary barriers to vaccine equality: supply is. Even if lower-income countries could purchase their own vaccines – which many of them can – there are just not enough doses to go around. This makes donations like that of $4 billion from the United States useless because there were no vaccines to purchase. Wealthy nations paid for their greediness with the Omicron variant, which proved the early scientists’ warnings to be true: global vaccine equality is the only solution to the pandemic. Experts believe that Omicron mutated in underdeveloped southern Africa, likely South Africa. The Duke Global Health Innovation Center describes the entire continent as essentially a “superincubator” due to low vaccination rates. In unvaccinated populations, the XVIII.3 20.
