Wealthy nations overcoming Covid urged not to forget poorer cousins

Suppressing the virus that’s advancing in India and beyond depends on persuading rich nations to share excess doses and help close a €16bn funding gap

The US, the EU and Britain are being urged to do more to aid poorer countries in their fights to beat the Covid-19 pandemic.

Mass vaccinations, falling case counts and waning coronavirus deaths in a few wealthy countries threaten to obscure ongoing worldwide suffering from the pandemic that’s likely to last for months, and perhaps years, to come.

That’s Carl Bildt’s worry as the new special envoy to the World Health Organisation-backed effort set up last year to dispatch vaccines and other weapons against Covid-19.

Suppressing the virus that’s advancing in India and beyond depends on persuading rich nations to share excess doses and help close a $19bn (€16bn) funding gap, Mr Bildt said.

An independent review of the international Covid-19 response has echoed Mr Bildt’s concerns, calling for Group of Seven countries to commit 60% of the money needed this year. The report urged high-income nations to provide more than 2 billion doses to poorer regions by the middle of 2022.

“The risk is that if people in the UK, EU or US. think the worst is over, the attention will shift,” he said. “The worst isn’t over.”

No stranger to high-stakes diplomatic efforts, Mr Bildt was co-chair of the 1995 Dayton peace talks that ended the war in Bosnia. He earlier led Sweden as prime minister when the government negotiated its entry into the EU.

Now he finds himself in the middle of an urgent campaign to galvanise support for the WHO’s Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator and push leaders to contribute more to the global fight.

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But as India grapples with a deadly surge among its population of 1.4 billion, worries are growing for many other spots all over the planet.

Despite declines in the developed world, more than 600,000 new Covid cases are reported globally each day, as stubborn epidemics in countries like Colombia, Brazil and Malaysia burn on.

Waiving patents on vaccines, a proposal the Biden administration supports, is promising but won’t address immediate needs for supply, said Ellen ‘t Hoen, director of Medicines Law & Policy, a research group based in the Netherlands.

“Anything that exists today should really go to places where the crisis is the most serious,” she said. “Maybe vaccinating teenagers in California shouldn’t be the priority at this point.” 

Covax, the vaccine initiative that’s part of the ACT-Accelerator, has shipped just 60 million doses - less than a quarter of the number already administered in the US alone. In their report on the pandemic response, the independent experts recommended a review of the Accelerator, citing shortcomings in the effort to ensure global access to shots, drugs and other supplies.

-Bloomberg