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A mother holds her daughter's arm as a healthcare worker administers the child with Pfizer-BNT covid-19 vaccine in Taiwan.
COVID vaccine rollout: Taking stock 3 years on
It’s been almost three years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.
Since then, we have gone from the fear of greeting one another in public to the horrors of overcrowded ERs and morgues — to the remarkably fast development of a vaccine and its uneven rollout. Nearly 7 million people have died worldwide, and while the virus is still out there, most countries now have access to effective jabs.
How did we do? In mid-2020, many of us were visiting loved ones through hospital windows, spraying our grocery bags with bleach, and wondering whether public life would ever again go “back to normal.” It seemed like the horror would never end, but a break in the clouds came in Dec. 2020, with the first mRNA vaccines making their way into arms in the US and UK. (Chinese jabs were developed first but proved less effective, and no one remembers Russia’s miracle drug that never was.)
While it seemed like a long wait, the vaccines were rolled out in record time. “We had a virus that was not known to science before December 31, 2019, and we had a vaccine in people's arms in December 2020,” says Dr. Amesh Adajla. a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
Prior to COVID, the fastest-ever rollout of a vaccine was for mumps, and that took nearly four years. Within 12 months, the coronavirus jab was available thanks to concentrated research. Decades of DNA research enabled scientists to being designing the mRNA for the COVID vaccine as soon as genetic code became available.
“Various scientific groups and manufacturers were able to provide enough doses to do very big studies very quickly, so we had answers super early,” says Dr. Margaret Ann Harris, an epidemiologist at the WHO. “Never in the history of humanity have we had really good data so quickly.”
Today, some 5.5 billion people around the globe – 72% of the population – have received at least one dose. But in the early months, the rollout was slow and uneven.
Global inequities in access and high rates of vaccine hesitancy made the world vulnerable to new variants. Vaccine nationalism — the me-first approach to battling COVID — saw Western countries opting to inoculate their own populations before sending vaccines abroad. But, as Ian Bremmer told us then, the race to outsmart COVID was (and is) global.
Health officials in early 2021 stressed the need to treat vulnerable populations around the globe first — and not only for humanitarian reasons. After all, outbreaks anywhere put everyone in danger of new mutations that could compromise the existing vaccines, as we’ve seen to varying degrees with both the delta and omicron variants.
The COVAX initiative worked to get vaccines to the rest of the world — to date delivering nearly 2 billion doses to 146 countries — but supply issues and vaccine nationalism slowed their efforts early on. Dr. Harris says she became “the most hated person in Britain” in early 2021 for saying that the next step after vaccinating the at-risk population at home should be to send jabs to vulnerable groups abroad.
So how can we do better next time? It’s perhaps no surprise that domestic politics pushed governments to cater to their own populations first.
“Politicians will always default to protectionism. The same thing happened during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic when Australia developed the first vaccine and they put export restrictions on it,” says Adajla.
The only way to avoid that is to make plans now. “We must put a clear strategy in place to distribute vaccines globally, put aside what keeps individual groups happy and go for what really needs to be done for humanity,” says Harris, noting how there are still plenty of countries where under 40% are vaccinated against COVID today
A WHO treaty is in the works that lays out recommendations for pandemic-related international cooperation, preparedness, and response. We’ll be watching to see whether it can help protect us from the scourge of vaccine nationalism.Whatever happened to equitable distribution? Live townhall today at 11 am ET
Today at 11 am ET, GZERO Media and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will convene leading experts in public health, research, development, and philanthropy to discuss the uneven state of recovery from health and economic perspectives.
As the world marks the two-year anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, most regions are still in the throes of outbreaks, and global vaccination rates are inconsistent – high in high-income countries, low in low-income countries.
How did this happen and why? Despite words of solidarity and a commitment to equity in the early days of the pandemic, the world has not seen that promise fulfilled. Can the gap be rectified to end the acute phase of this pandemic? And what has to be done to solve this for the future?
- José Manuel Barroso, Board Chair, Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance
- Ian Bremmer, President and Founder, Eurasia Group and GZERO Media
- Dr. John Nkengasong, Director, Africa Centers for Disease Control (Africa CDC)
- Melanie Saville, Director, Vaccine Research and Development, CEPI
- Mark Suzman, CEO, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
The Graphic Truth: Who relies on India's COVID vaccines?
Five months after halting vaccine exports amid a catastrophic COVID wave, India now plans to resume vaccine exports next month, vowing to produce some 300 million vaccine doses in October alone. Until then, India had exported more than 66 million doses, which were sold, given as grants or snapped up by COVAX, the UN-backed initiative to vaccinate low- and middle-income countries. COVAX had been relying on Indian manufacturers to deliver the bulk of its supply, and the export ban has been a massive blow to the program, which is well behind its target. We take a look at which countries have gotten the most shots from India to date, and their respective vaccination rates.
In this photo illustration a medical syringe seen displayed in front of the Covax Facility vaccine logo.
What We’re Watching: COVAX falls short, UK returns migrant boats to France, Guinea coup memes
COVAX comes up short. Who's to blame? The World Health Organization revealed Wednesday that the COVAX scheme would fall half a billion doses short of its target to deliver 1.9 billion COVID vaccine doses to low- and middle-income ex countries by the end of 2021. Several factors have contributed to this shortfall, including India's decision to halt vaccine exports earlier this year amid a catastrophic COVID outbreak, and mixed messaging from the WHO and national governments about the safety and scaling of certain vaccines that disrupted COVAX's supply chain. The WHO has long taken aim at rich countries rolling out booster shots before developing states dole out first and second shots to their populations. But US President Joe Biden hit back in recent days saying that the argument of boosters vs donating shots is "a false choice," saying the US can, and has, done both. So far, COVAX has delivered 245 million doses, but just 0.4 percent of all jabs administered globally have been in low-income states.
UK clashes with France over migrant boats: Every summer, thousands of migrants trying to get to the UK cross the English Channel from France in rickety little dinghies. Amid particularly high numbers this year, British authorities have now approved plans to turn them away entirely. Stopping those migrants is now the "number one priority" for UK Home Secretary Priti Patel, whose boss, PM Boris Johnson, got to where he is in part by taking a hard line on immigration. But France says forcing people back out to sea without assistance would violate maritime law, while migrant-support groups worry that the practice could put migrants' lives at risk. The UK helps to fund French efforts to intercept departures, but London is now also threatening — somewhat puzzlingly — to withhold that money entirely unless Paris does a better job.
Guinea's deposed president goes viral: If getting ousted in a military coup wasn't bad enough, Guinea's toppled President Alpha Condé is now being mocked online. Hours after seizing power, soldiers posted an image of the 83-year-old Condé splayed out on a couch, barefoot and wearing jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, looking curiously chill while surrounded by heavily armed men in masks. Enter the meme: that picture has now inspired the Twitter-trending #alphacondechallenge, in which users all across West Africa are making and sharing hilarious parodies of the shot. A South African newspaper says the photoshopped images are a tribute to the African proverb: "If we don't laugh, we will surely cry". We're not sure if Condé himself is aware of his unwitting contribution to meme culture, but we do hope he has a smartphone to kill time while he's in the custody of Guinea's new junta.
Belarus human rights abuses stacking up; Beirut blast one year later
Ian Bremmer shares his insights on global politics this week with a look at the deteriorating human rights situation in Belarus, Delta variant woes, and Lebanon one year after the Beirut blast.
An Olympian refuses to return home to Belarus and an anti-Lukashenko activist has been found dead in Ukraine. What's going on?
Yeah. That anti-Lukashenko activist was found hanged in a park in Kiev. Once again, not exactly likely a suicide. These anti-Lukashenko activists have a way of turning up injured or dead. It's a horrible regime. Their friends are limited largely to the Russians. That's about it. The economic pressure is growing from Europe, from the United States, very coordinated. But the problem is a very hard to do much to Lukashenko when he has not only support of his military, but also the support of most of the workers in the country who aren't prepared to strike because they want to ensure they still have jobs. I expect this is going to continue, but human rights abuses are stacking up. It is nice to see that the Americans and the Europeans are coordinating policy as well as they have been.
How has Delta variant added to the COVAX woes?
Well, we've seen a lot more cases. I mean Florida, for example, right now, highest level of cases since this pandemic has started. Hospitalizations too. But not deaths. Death numbers across the country are still comparatively very low. That's also true in Europe. Why is that? That's because even though vaccines overall are not where they need to be in the United States, the people that are most vulnerable to dying, the seriously elderly, those with pre-existing conditions are also among the most likely, sensibly, to get vaccines. And so it was a consequence. Death numbers are still mercifully comparatively low, and I suspect they're going to stay low. Having said that, we don't know much about long COVID. We do know about 50% of the people that get symptoms have those symptoms persist. The healthcare costs of that, the psychological costs of that, the reality of the quality of life, it's deteriorating for a much longer period of time. That's what we worry about the most. The thing I'm most worried about globally is China, where they're locking down big cities in part because they have no tolerance for the pandemic to grow in China. But also because their vaccines really don't work against Delta variant. That could slow down the second largest economy in the world. Watch that over the next few months.
A year after the Beirut blast, what has changed in Lebanon? One of the biggest non-nuclear blasts in global history.
Answer is very little has changed. The investigation is going nowhere. One of the few things that various factions around the government can agree with is that they don't want to be tried for corruption by independent investigators so they've been slow rolling it. Economic collapse, not much international support. Emmanuel Macron, you'll remember the French president, went down said we're going to help these people. There's been very little international aid and no new conference trying to raise that support for Lebanon. They are close to becoming a failed state and maybe not a surprise given how bad both COVID and the financial crisis has hit a country that was already among the most poorly governed in the region and the world.
COVID hypocrisy & misinformation
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
Hi, everybody. Ian Bremmer here from sunny Nantucket and going to be here for a little bit. Thought we would talk about the latest on COVID. Certainly, we had hoped we'd be talking less about it at this point, at least in terms of the developed world. A combination of the transmissibility of Delta variant and the extraordinary misinformation around vaccines and COVID treatment means that we are not in the position that many certainly had hoped we would be today.
The United States is the biggest problem on this front. We are awash in vaccines. Operation Warp Speed was an enormous success. The best vaccines in the world, the most effective mRNA, the United States doing everything it can to get secure doses for the entire country quick, more quickly than any other major economy in the world, and now we're having a hard time convincing people to take them. The politics around this are nasty and as divided as the country, absolutely not what you want to see in response to a health crisis.
On the left, I'm seeing so much talk about mask mandates and so much hypocrisy. The mayor of Washington, DC announcing a mask mandate for the entire district and literally within hours, she shows up to officiate a wedding and nobody's wearing masks, including the mayor, Muriel Bowser. You remember back, the governor of California, now under a recall campaign, Gavin Newsom, when everything was shut down and he's there at the French Laundry, a great restaurant, having an indoor party with his buddies mask-less when nobody else was doing that. President Obama, former President Obama now about to have 475 people at a big party for his 60th birthday in the (Martha's) Vineyard while you have so many among the Democrats that are saying, "no, we have to have mask mandates when cases are increasing. You shouldn't be gathering in these larger groups."
At the same time, you've got people like Governor DeSantis in Florida, Governor Abbott in Texas, and others that are saying that vaccine mandates among private corporations should be illegal. That if you're a restaurant, if you're a store, you're not allowed to tell people who are coming into your establishment that they have to show proof of vaccination, which strikes me as a ludicrous thing to do. And certainly, given how extraordinarily effective we know these vaccines are, there's just far too much virtue signaling.
We don't need everyone in the country wearing masks. We just need everyone vaccinated. And there need to be consequences otherwise. And yes, I know the vaccines are not yet proven safe for children. I would not make an argument that we should be requiring children to take vaccines until we know that they're safe. But we also know that those children are at extremely low risk for getting sick and dying from the disease. And given the amount of damage lack of attending classes does to kids and their development for well over a year now, the idea that we have teachers unions in the United States that are saying, "no, we refuse to open up classes again this fall given where the country is," that's extraordinary to me. It shouldn't be allowed. The schools have to open across the country. It's not like the danger of the disease is the only danger that's out there. You've got economic damage. You've got sociological and psychological damage. We have to get people, particularly poor people, at able to live normal lives. And who are the ones that can't effectively homeschool or have private tutors? Those are the ones that are going to be most affected by this yet again. So, I think that's a serious problem.
This outrageous politics-first approach on COVID response promotes misinformation. It is a tax on the poor and the uneducated. The wealthiest 1% in the United States are almost all vaccinated. The people with graduate degrees are almost all vaccinated, but the QAnon supporters, the National Enquirer readers, they are not. And if you believe that Trump actually won the presidency and is going to be reinstated in the next few weeks, of course you believe that the Delta variant is a fraud and that the vaccine is mind control. Bad domestic actors are perpetrating this on America. People are profiting from this. Social media companies are allowing this disinformation to persist. It is not coming from the Kremlin. We in the US are damaging ourselves far worse than Moscow or Beijing ever could. And that's in the United States.
And meanwhile, while the Americans are awash in vaccines that we are not taking and that are even going bad in Africa, the continent is almost fully un-vaccinated. 1.3 billion people on the African continent, 1% of that population is fully vaccinated. It's an obscenity. It can only be allowed to persist if we think that people living in Africa somehow aren't fully human beings, that they don't deserve the opportunities, the health care, the ability to live and protect their families, their children the way that we do in the wealthy countries.
I saw Secretary of State Tony Blinken saying that we are, the United States, sharing as many safe and effective vaccines around the world as possible. I couldn't believe he said that. I know Tony and I understand, and he's not a bad guy, I've known him for a long time, and as secretary of state, you have to be diplomatic. You can't always say what you mean. It's certainly why I shouldn't have that job, but this is just a false hood. The United States is not doing anything close to everything we can for the rest of the world.
We are shockingly ungenerous in the ability and willingness to fund and to provide vaccines for those that don't have them. The COVAX Facility so far, 150 million doses delivered. The plan, the modest and reasonable plan for now was 650 million doses. We are 500 million doses short. It's underfunded. You had 1.8 billion per vaccine delivery that was provided for last month, over a billion dollars short of their modest goals. This was the kind of thing, it's not just the United States, pretty much any G20 economy, maybe not Argentina, any individual G20 economy could have done the COVAX funding by themselves, and they didn't. They all looked, I guess, not even at each other because they wouldn't budge. As long as you're taking care of your own country, that's all you need to do.
In this environment at a time that we are facing the worst crisis of our lifetimes, the United States on the one hand, refuses to follow basic science. We are as deeply politicized as any time we've ever experienced it, pointing fingers, calling names, thinking that we are our own worst enemy while we're not taking care of even the basics. And we can so easily afford to do so for those around the world.
It's much easier not to talk about this. It's much easier to not to focus on it. But if we can't get this right for COVID, how are we going to get it right for the bigger crises to come? How do we get it right for climate? How do we get it right for terrorism, for migration? How do we get it right for the next pandemic or the next variants of COVID? It's challenging and it's something we're going to keep talking about, but something I wanted to address today. As so many of us are thinking about summer and enjoying ourselves and our families and our friends, and that's all wonderful, but spare a thought and some action for those that are not so fortunate.
And I hope everyone's doing well. And I'll talk to you all real soon.
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A person holds a placard as supporters of the Economic Freedom Fighters march to demand a rollout of COVID vaccines, in Pretoria, South Africa.
Africa’s COVID crisis and the politics of selfishness
This time last year, world health experts were speculating about why Africa appeared to have escaped the worst of the global pandemic. Younger populations? Natural immunity created by exposure to past viruses? Something else?
They can stop wondering. Africa is now in the grip of a COVID emergency.
A few bleak facts:
- Of the 10 countries with the highest number of current COVID deaths per capita in the week before July 18, three of the top six are in Africa. That includes Namibia at #1, Tunisia at #2, and South Africa at #6.
- Last week, recorded COVID deaths in Africa jumped 40 percent from the previous week.
- Just 1 percent of Africa's 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated. African governments will be very lucky if that number reaches 10 percent by the end of 2021.
- African countries were slated to receive many more AstraZeneca vaccine doses from India. That was before India became a global COVID hotspot.
- Of 77.6 million doses that the COVAX facility, a vaccine-sharing initiative, has allocated to African countries, fewer than 16 million had arrived in Africa by July 7.
There are many explanations for Africa's new COVID troubles. Healthcare facilities are below international standards in many of Africa's 54 countries. Governments don't have the bureaucracies to roll out treatments and vaccine doses as efficiently as in wealthier parts of the world. Poor infrastructure in some countries compounds that problem.
But the G-Zero world disorder plays a role here too. G-Zero is a term coined by our boss, Ian Bremmer, to describe an "every nation for itself" approach to global politics that has become the dominant trend in today's world.
It's not that wealthy countries have done nothing to help Africa. Without support from the US, EU, and other rich countries, COVAX wouldn't exist to provide vaccines to anyone. But while it's completely understandable that American and European leaders want to vaccinate Americans and Europeans first, the scale of vaccine selfishness has become a topic of hot debate.
Here's your key data point: According to One.org, an activist organization, "The world's richest countries could vaccinate their entire populations and still have over 1.9 billion doses to share — enough to vaccinate the entire adult population of Africa."
As it is, healthy young people in the US and Europe will be vaccinated months before many frontline healthcare workers, elderly people, and people with serious underlying medical conditions in Africa.
Some may see this as a sad but understandable reality. Wealthier nations and people have always enjoyed advantages while the poor suffer what they must. But there are two obvious responses to that.
First, selfishness can be a matter of degree. It's one thing to argue that "my people must be vaccinated first." It's quite another to horde excess supplies that might never be used and to consider booster shots for young healthy people in one country while frontline health workers in other countries can't even get their very first vaccine dose.
Second, every time COVID is transmitted from one person to another, it mutates. Enough mutations create variants — like the delta variant that has caused COVID to rise not only in Africa, but also in the United States and Europe. Leave enough people unvaccinated and we sharply increase the risk that future variants — maybe more transmissible and more lethal than the now prevalent delta variant — will be infecting vaccinated people everywhere.
What We're Watching: Africa's vaccine shortage, Colombian unrest, Bibi fails to form government
India's COVID crisis hurts Africa: As COVID started to ravage India in March, New Delhi announced a ban on all vaccine exports to prioritize the domestic crisis. This development was a massive blow for the COVAX facility, which is relying on India's Serum Institute manufacturing the AstraZeneca shot for low-income countries. The impact of this export ban is now being felt acutely across Africa, where many countries have received a scarce number of doses. The World Health Organization says that at least seven African countries including Rwanda, Ghana, and Senegal have already exhausted all their vaccine supplies — and because of delays from India, will now need to wait several weeks for more to arrive. COVAX, which has received 90 million fewer doses to date than it was initially promised, says it needs an extra 20 million doses by the end of June to offset shortfalls caused by the worsening crisis in India. It's a worrying trend: while inoculation drives in places like the US, the UK and Israel are allowing their economies to reopen and life to slowly return to normal, many low-income countries will not return to normalcy for years, experts warn. To date, only 2 percent of all doses administered globally have been in Africa, despite the continent accounting for 17 percent of the global population.
Colombian unrest over tax reform: The UN has called out Colombia for using excessive force to disperse recent street protests against the government's planned tax hikes, which left at least 19 people dead in Cali, the country's third largest city. The protesters wanted President Iván Duque to withdraw his controversial proposal to raise taxes for the middle class, which Duque says is needed in order to raise revenue to help the Colombian economy recover from the pandemic. But the backlash against his measures was so strong that the government quickly relented. The fact that Duque caved after just a few days of rallies underscores how unpopular his proposed reforms are, and will likely limit his government's ability to cut back on any social spending before his term ends next year. Whoever takes over from Duque will now have to deal with a sizable hole in Colombia's finances, and the economy could become a big campaign issue in the 2022 presidential election — in which the frontrunner is now Gustavo Petro, the big-spending former mayor of the capital Bogotá.
Israel's political stalemate persists: Four weeks after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party won the most seats in parliamentary elections — and was then tapped by President Reuven Rivlin to try and form a coalition government — Israel's political stalemate continues. After Bibi has failed again to bring enough parties together to form a workable coalition, there are several potential scenarios for how this could all play out. Rivlin could ask Yesh Atid (There is a Future) leader Yair Lapid, who heads the anti-Bibi opposition bloc and came in second in the March vote, to try and reach a 61-seat majority. Israeli media report that this is the most likely scenario, though it won't be an easy feat for Lapid amid Israel's deeply divided political milieu. Rivlin could also throw the mandate to Naftali Bennett, a former Netanyahu ally who leads a small right-wing party but whose support both sides need to form a government. Center left-leaning Lapid and Bennett might try to work together to oust Netanyahu, but ideological differences would likely undermine that effort. Both politicians say they are committed to doing whatever it takes to avoid another election, which would be Israel's fifth since April 2019. But if the current political stalemate persists, that's exactly where this is all heading.