While rich countries hoard doses, Covax, a joint initiative from several UN agencies set up to deliver vaccines to poor countries, is arguably a knight in the suit. shining armor. Dreamed in early 2020 by the heads of two Gates-funded nonprofits via scotch and nachosCovax’s goal is to ensure equal access to vaccines for all countries and prevent the exact scenario the world is in right now. And at the start of the year, the plans look rosy: More than 190 countries registered donate and receive doses of vaccines through this initiative.
Then things started to go wrong. The initiative’s main supplier, the Serum Institute in India, which makes the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines, has not been able to live up to its promises; Domestic cases spiked in March 2021, forcing it to cut exports. Negotiations with vaccine manufacturers such as Moderna and Pfizer to sell doses to Covax have become paint outside. Covax officials have been forced to move their goal of delivering 2 billion doses of the drug from this year to 2022. Despite initial commitments, Covax is expected to miss the target for 2021 by almost a third.
But some think that Covax will never achieve its lofty goals. According to Venkatapuram, in early 2021, Covax officials made PR statements to hide what was really going on behind the scenes. “They are using their communications basically to talk to rich country leaders and rich countries, and try to get them involved and cooperate, while not giving us a signal. really good about the kind of precarious situation we’re in,” he said.
A spokesperson for Gavi, the nonprofit that oversees Covax, challenged this ethos, telling WIRED by email that “despite the ongoing variability in prescribed times, available dosages and factors For other factors, Covax maintains regular communication with participating economies, including changes in supply volumes, schedules and deadlines. (The organization generally does not disclose the names of the spokespersons.)
When vaccine shipments failed to materialize, the ambassadors of vaccine-poor countries Desperate contact with Covax to know when they can expect their portion. Rahman said she and her colleagues asked Covax heads a question: When, for example, was the vaccine sold to Senegal? And, she recalls, they would answer something like, “There’s a lot of moving parts.” “I started to despise the phrase ‘have a lot of moving parts,’ because to me it meant they didn’t know what was going on,” she says.
Rahman feels that the people overseeing Covax were not coordinating with the authorities in the very countries they were trying to send the vaccine to. Indeed, due to insufficient consultation, many poor countries have been forced to throw out thousands of expired pills because of the lack of infrastructure needed to store and transport them. If they had properly communicated with the local authorities in these countries, this could have been avoided, says Rahman. “It’s just a giant, disorganized mess in terms of indigenous knowledge.”
