Without a magic wand, no country would be able to vaccinate a large number of people immediately, but for developing countries, the barriers between approval in the northern hemisphere and a stab in the arm in the ‘global south’ are infinitely more challenging.
On the heels of extraordinarily successful results announced by four Covid-19 vaccine developers within three weeks in a row, the question is whether developing countries will be ‘left behind’.
COVAX, a massively funded global collaboration involving 187 countries, aims to ensure that this is not the case, and 92 of the least advanced countries help provide a vaccine for the most vulnerable 20% of their population for sale and expansion – although only about 3% of all countries’ populations will receive vaccinations via COVAX in early 2021.
Over the past few weeks, astonishingly constructive news has been seen about Covid-19 vaccines: global pharmaceutical giants Pfizer / BioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca have all announced better-than-expected efficiencies of three vaccines from large-scale clinical trials (two above 90%, one at 70%). %), which makes the long-standing promise of the victory of coronavirus a reality. A fourth, Sputnik, of the Russian Gamaleya Research Institute, also announced a 95% efficacy, but the lack of available data on its clinical trials has led to …