Giving Compass' Take:
- Gavin Yamey explains that wealthy countries need to stop vaccine hoarding and actively work to ensure that the COVID vaccine is distributed globally to prevent variations from developing and spreading.
- What role can you play in supporting the effective distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine globally?
- Read about the challenges of COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
What is Giving Compass?
We connect donors to learning resources and ways to support community-led solutions. Learn more about us.
If wealthy nations keep hoarding COVID-19 vaccines, the pandemic could continue for years to come, says Gavin Yamey, a global health expert.
Just 10 countries account for three quarters of the 191 million COVID-19 vaccinations given through mid-February, a sign that the race to vaccinate the world is hardly on even footing.
And if wealthy nations don’t act quickly to ensure a more equitable allocation of vaccines, it’s a race everyone could lose, says Yamey.
Yamey offers the warning in a commentary in the journal Nature, in which he urges wealthy nations to donate portions of the vaccines they have purchased to low- and middle-income countries priced out of acquiring doses. In some 130 countries with a total population of 2.5 billion, not a single person has received the COVID vaccine, he notes.
“There’s a mantra in global health that an outbreak anywhere could lead to an outbreak everywhere, and that’s why it’s in our interest collectively as an international community to start sharing doses (and) to make sure we expand the global vaccine supply,” Yamey says.
Read the full article about COVID vaccine hoarding from Duke University at Futurity.