On 29th January 2021, there was a peculiar and poignant sight at a WHO press conference. A midwife from Uganda and a nurse from Pakistan made the headlines while pleading for vaccine supplies for underdeveloped and developing countries! Michael Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Programme, calls a spade a spade – “They are right at the end of the queue. They see people at the top of the queue fighting about where they are in the line. It looks like fighting over the cake – when they don’t even have access to the crumbs”! Meanwhile, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been furious with richer nations as they respond with heightened nationalism while poorer countries including their frontline health workers seem to be at the end a very long line. He also called on countries that had vaccines left over after vaccinating their own urgent health staff and high priority groups to share them with others under the Covax programme. In his own words, “health and care workers have been on the frontlines of the covid-19 pandemic but are often under-protected and overexposed. They need vaccines now”. This current situation exposes the great schism that lies between the haves and the have nots of this world! It turns out – even a global pandemic can’t narrow the gap! Previous op-eds have raised the spectre of vaccine nationalism undercutting the initial bonhomie of sharing vaccine supplies. It seems like we are already there! But developed nations must pay heed to their unfortunate brethren as well. Why? Because a global contagion requires a global solution! Consider.
While governments eye export restrictions and additional tariffs to protect their population and shore up their revenues, one crucial observation has been overlooked. If an infection knows no borders then how come anything but a borderless vaccination programme will suffice?! That is logic 101! And even if the humanitarian angle is kept aside – and that is a big concession – the economic equation still favours international and collective vaccination.
Just like a country, no economy is an island. This has been apparent from the last half a century or so. Underpin by technology, the interdependencies of trade and economics suggest that any potential and colossal financial losses from the pandemic can only be contained through efficient international coordination and equitable access to testing and vaccinations. Just one look at the impeded flow of goods between EU and UK is enough to confirm this concern! Furthermore, leaving the underprivileged behind also has indirect fiscal consequences. All developed countries have defined ‘optimal vaccination’ differently – some consider this threshold to be reached when the adult population is vaccinated while others go beyond that. But even if they reach this ‘optimal vaccination’ level by end of Q2 or beginning of Q3 this year and if vaccination rates in developing nations remain as they are, the richer nations will still end up bearing indirect costs in trillions of US$!
To put this into numbers, the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has recently published a revised study which is an eye-opener! For context, the ICC is an institutional representative of more than 45 million companies in over 100 countries. It’s core mission is to make business work for everyone, every day, everywhere. It’s latest report is a chorus of numbers!
On one hand – an uncoordinated and inequitable approach to vaccine distribution and no vaccinations in emerging markets may result in global GDP losses of as much as US$ 9.2 trillion in 2021. This is equivalent to more than 7% of pre-pandemic global GDP! On the other hand – even if developing countries are able to vaccinate half of their populations by the end of 2021, which is quite a stretch, total global costs would still amount to US$ 3.8 trillion, about half of which would be borne by advanced economies, amounting to US$ 1.9 trillion!
ICC has also suggested that there is a wide funding gap in the Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator which will also have financial implications. The ACT Accelerator is a ground breaking global collaboration to accelerate development, production, and distribution of COVID-19 tests, treatments, and vaccines. The WHO launched the ACT Accelerator at the end of April 2020 with the solitary purpose of bringing together governments, scientists, businesses, civil society, philanthropists, and global health organizations to ensure rapid and equitable access to COVID-19 vaccination programmes. Even this noble endeavour is missing US$ 22.1 billion for 2021! The United States still has to cough up its pledged US$ 2 billion and it faces a potential loss of US$ 744 billion if the current scenario of inequal vaccine distribution prevails!
This underlays the fact that the dire need of the time is that developed countries ensure parity when it comes to vaccine availability rather than further fan the flames of vaccine nationalism! If they don’t comprehend the human argument at-least they should fathom the economic contention! If not, then the inhabitants of this world will be looking at further seasons of exacerbated economic misery!
The writer is Director Programmes for an international ICT organization based in the UK and writes on corporate strategy, socio-economic and geopolitical issues
