Overseas Situation Report Friday 3rd September 2021
By Mike Evans
In this report as the EU trumpets the fact that 70% of its citizens are now vaccinated we look at how the world is dealing with the vaccines. There is still a large gap between the “haves and the Have Nots’ ‘ regarding vaccines and this week we see that the WHO is calling on the rich nations to donate at least 1 billion doses of vaccine to the third world countries struggling to find vaccines for their citizens.
In July 2020 the WHO set up the Independent Panel on Pandemic Preparedness and Response. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, former President of Liberia, and Helen Clark, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, expressed deep concern over the slow pace of vaccine redistribution from high-income to low-income countries.
The two former leaders served as co-chairs of the Independent Panel and published their final report in May of this year.
“The Independent Panel report recommended that high-income countries ensure that at least one billion doses of vaccines available to them were redistributed to 92 low and middle-income countries by 1 September, and a further one billion doses by mid-2022”, they declared.
“Ensuring that all those around the world most vulnerable to the impact of the virus, including healthcare workers, older people and those with significant comorbidities, can be vaccinated quickly is a critical step towards curbing the pandemic.”
To date, the global solidarity initiative COVAX has shipped 99 million donated doses, they said. While 92 countries have received some 89 million vaccines, this is far short of the one billion called for in the report.
“High-income countries have ordered over twice as many doses as are needed for their populations. Now is the time to show solidarity with those who have not yet been able to vaccinate their frontline health workers and most vulnerable populations,” the former leaders stated.
“Reaching the goal of redistributing one billion doses by 1 September would be a vital step in protecting the five billion people aged 15 and over who live in low- and middle-income countries. The 600 million doses which have already been pledged now need to be delivered with urgency”, they added.
Additionally, rapid action is needed to step up vaccine production in low- and middle-income countries.
“Manufacturing capacity has to be increased and knowledge and technology shared in order to scale up production quickly,” the two experts recommended. “This pandemic has shown the global risks of locating the know-how and manufacturing facilities in just a handful of countries.”
The co-chairs have also welcomed the establishment of a COVID-19 mRNA vaccine technology hub in South Africa, adding that more such announcements are needed.
“Low and middle-income countries must be able to produce more of their own vaccines and thereby help increase in general the amount of vaccine available to the world”, they said.
What is COVAX? It is part of the drive by the WHO to see a greater equality of distribution of vaccines across the world. A part of this, The ACT-Accelerator was set up to contain the COVID-19 pandemic faster and more efficiently by ensuring that successful diagnostics, vaccines and treatments are shared equitably across all countries.
Key to achieving that goal is the design and implementation of a Fair Allocation Framework.
Equitable distribution is particularly important in the area of vaccines, which, if used correctly and equitably, could help to stop the acute phase of the pandemic and allow the rebuilding of our societies and economies.
Although the ACT-Accelerator will speed up development and production, initial supplies will be limited. If there is no international plan to manage vaccine distribution fairly, there will be hoarding in some places and life-threatening shortages in others. There will also be price spikes.
So WHO advises that once a vaccine(s) is shown to be safe and effective, and authorized for use, all countries receive doses in proportion to their population size, albeit initially in reduced quantities. This will enable every country to start by immunizing the highest priority populations.
In the second phase, vaccines would continue to be deployed to all countries so that additional populations can be covered according to national priorities.
So who has contributed. The U.S. has delivered 110 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to 65 countries, from Afghanistan to Zambia, President Biden announced at the start of August 2021. The U.S. donations prove that “democracies can deliver,” Biden said. He added that the U.S. has acquired another 500 million Pfizer vaccines that will be donated to low- and middle-income countries by the end of the month, emphasizing that global vaccination is essential: “You can’t build a wall high enough to keep us safe from COVID in other countries.”
These initial U.S. donated doses are just a first step for the projected 11 billion vaccines needed to vaccinate 70% of the world’s population and bring the pandemic under control, according to the World Health Organization.
And providing doses to other countries is a quasi-Herculean task. “Sharing vaccine doses isn’t quite as easy as just putting them on a plane and calling somebody at the other end and telling them when they’ll arrive,” said Gayle Smith, the global COVID-19 response coordinator at the State Department.
There have been some delays. Biden first announced that the U.S. would distribute 80 million doses to countries in need by the end of June, only later to say the goal had simply been to “allocate” them by the end of June.
After the US, the next largest donor is the UK with 100 million pledged doses, followed by Japan, France, Germany, and China, all around the 30 million dose mark. The top ten list of donors (by number of doses) include two middle-income countries. China (upper-middle income) has donated vaccines to the highest number of countries (our data shows 59, but other sources have suggested 80), primarily located in Africa and Asia. However, these tend to be small donations, with most donations around 200,000 doses per country and only three countries receiving more than 1 million doses. India (lower-middle income) has taken a similar approach, donating more than 11 million doses in relatively small numbers to 47 countries, with only a few countries receiving more than 1 million doses.
Looking by region, Asia is meant to receive the highest number (58 million doses), followed by Africa (20 million doses). COVAX is receiving more doses by far than any region, at 700 million doses. The US purchase of 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech doses for donation through COVAX means that the vast majority of donated doses are Pfizer-BioNTech. But after this, the second-most donated vaccine is Oxford-AstraZeneca, followed by Sinopharm-Beijing.
The EU has fallen significantly behind China and the U.S. in terms of coronavirus vaccine donations, according to an internal Council document seen by POLITICO Monday. The EU has donated just 7.9 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines — 4 percent of the total 200 million pledged by EU countries. That compares with 59.8 million doses already donated by the U.S. and 24.2 million doses donated by China. The figures come from a Council working paper dated August 2.
The document comes in the wake of comments from EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, who said last Friday that the bloc’s “insufficient” vaccine shipments to Africa and Latin America risked Europe losing influence to China. “China’s expansion in Africa and Latin America should concern us and should occupy us a great deal,” he said. In clear evidence that the EU is keenly aware of the importance of vaccine diplomacy, a series of slides presented to EU ambassadors detail how China, Russia, the U.S. and the EU compare on vaccine distribution around the globe.
The document maps out purchase agreements and donations, as well noting which regions are most strategically important to the EU, with highly detailed slides on vaccines delivered to North Africa, Turkey, the Balkans and the Eastern Partnership countries. These slides include information such as where the delivery came from, which vaccines they were and what percentage of the population in these countries is vaccinated.
The EU’s international vaccine distribution is more robust in terms of exports, however, with more than 503 million vaccines sent to 51 countries, most of which are wealthier economies. The EU also cites the fact that it has pledged €3.4 billion to COVAX.
As time goes on we can but hope that these vaccines get through to these poorer countries so the world can start to say the Pandemic is Over. Until the next time Stay Safe.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1098882
https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-coronavirus-vaccine-donations-china-united-states/
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/weekly-trends/#countries
“We only had a cough, fever and it didn’t last long. Beverly was also in good condition and didn’t show any symptoms,” Tirza explains. “But one week later she began to show symptoms, one of them was she had difficulty sleeping and when she breast-fed, she vomited.” As Beverly’s condition worsened, the family doctor said she needed immediate hospital care. Her parents went from place to place, searching around 10 hospitals in the Jakarta area until they found one with space to take her.
The small plot is decorated with rose petals in the shape of a heart. An angel figurine rests against the slate plaque. “It was her heart. Because her heart was pumped so many times her breathing was not stable,” says Beverly’s heartbroken mother. “In the end, she was exhausted and her heart suddenly stopped because her heart was very exhausted.”
For India the increase of 17% on the week is especially worrying as they have been seeing a steady drop of infections since the start of July and only in the last week have cases started to rise again.
Japan’s story may suit the incoming administration of President Ebrahim Raisi (Raeesi) in blaming the government of former president Hassan Rouhani for any ills, including the extent of Covid. Halakouei-Naieni told Javan that Covid had been deliberately allowed to spread for financial gain. Health officials had “let the virus loose for the benefit of some people” with stakes in drugs companies: “It’s as if this disease ensures the interests of some people and the conflict of interests has prevented planning for containment of the coronavirus.”
In this report we will look at various places where things are not getting better. We start with Florida, home of theme parks, Disney and one of the top holiday venues in the world. More people in Florida are catching the coronavirus, being hospitalized and dying of Covid-19 now than at any previous point in the pandemic, underscoring the perils of limiting public health measures as the Delta variant rips through the state.
Meanwhile across the Pacific in Japan, hosts of the Paralympic games, the Prime Minister, has officially expanded the coronavirus state of emergency to cover 8 more prefectures where infections are spreading rapidly. As Tokyo hosts the Paralympics, nearly half of Japan’s prefectures will be under the measure.
Ismail Sabri took over as prime minister after Muhyiddin Yassin resigned last week, following a rocky 17 months in office wrought by political infighting within the ruling coalition. It ultimately cost Muhyiddin his position. The new prime minister now faces an immediate challenge of taming Malaysia’s surging Covid infections and rising death count, as well as reviving an economy that has suffered from multiple rounds of lockdowns.