Hyderabad (Telangana): Seventy percent of the world's 7.9 billion people are still needed to be vaccinated to curb pandemic, and as of June 21, 2021, only 10.04% of the population mostly rich countries had been vaccinated fully, with just 0.9% of people in poor nations receiving just a single dose. This is because one-seventh of the population comprising of rich nations had reserved half of all available vaccines by June 2021, say public health experts.
Already United States, Canada, United Kingdom, European Union and Japan came forward to announce that they would provide 1 billion jabs to poor nations. However, efforts are still on to ensure that a fair vaccination policy is implemented to provide equal access, at the same time to curb the virus from mutating further. Health experts opine that 70% of the people on the globe need to be administered the vaccine in order to end the pandemic, which means 7.9 billion people must be vaccinated.
It needs to be understood that the reason for countries to be able to vaccinate their citizens while some other countries face a disease outbreak is not just due to supply-related constraints but distribution. For instance, the US had purchased 1.2 billion Covid19 vaccines (around 3.7 doses for a single person), whereas Canada had procured 381 million jabs which is five times than needed, wherein Canadians can be inoculated with two doses.
This over-purchase by the rich nations has resulted in low and middle-income nations finding it hard to purchase the Covid vaccines, through the COVAX initiative. Even countries like Benin and Honduras had purchased around two lakh doses of Sinovac (China's COVID vaccine) and 1.4 million doses of Covishield (AstraZeneca) respectively. Sadly, Haiti which was provided over 4,61,500 doses of Covid vaccine is facing a severe Coronavirus outbreak.
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Also, numerical simulations have revealed that 61% of global deaths could have been prevented, had countries come forward and implemented an equitable vaccine distribution strategy.
In other words, had global nations united earlier the Covid19 death toll could've been reduced by half. The situation of vaccine inequality is also worse within those countries where severe inequality exists.
