Despite the fact that the United States has a surplus of COVID vaccines, the nation is witnessing a surge in infections from the Delta variant of the coronavirus. With 100 million eligible Americans hesitant or refusing to be vaccinated, cases and hospitalizations have reached a six-month high. During the first week in August, COVID-19 cases have averaged 100,000 for three days in a row, up 35 percent. Louisiana, Florida and Arkansas reported the most new cases in the same time period, with hospitalizations rising 40 percent and deaths, a lagging indicator, increasing by 18 percent.
In much of the rest of the world, particularly developing nations, however, coronavirus infections are soaring due to the lack of vaccines, the same vaccines that are plentiful in the U.S. According to the United Nations, poor nations received less than one percent of COVID vaccine doses, as the World Trade Organization is considering temporarily waiving pharmaceutical patents so developing countries can produce and distribute their own COVID vaccines, tests and treatments. Science tells us that without fully vaccinating the people of the world, we’ll continue to see the creation of new, more dangerous mutations of the coronavirus.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Eric LeCompte, executive director of the Jubilee USA Network, who discusses the work he’s doing in collaboration with religious leaders from around the world to waive drug company patents and raise the funds necessary to close the extremely dangerous global COVID vaccine access gap.
ERIC LECOMPTE: According to the United Nations, 82 percent of all vaccines have gone to wealthy countries. We break that down 75 percent of all vaccine doses right now have gone to the 10 wealthiest countries in the world where low-income countries, poor countries have received only around 1 percent of vaccine. It’s an incredibly serious problem. And it has lots of causes, but for us in the United States, it’s an incredible concern, as terrible as the Delta (variant) is running rampant across parts of the United States. The situation in the developing world is even more dire and there’s not access to vaccines to stem what they are experiencing in Latin America, Asia and Africa — a third or fourth wave of the pandemic.
So we need, in order to just vaccinate, this idea of herd immunity, which is taking on different meetings as time goes on, but to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, we need 11 billion vaccine doses. And we’re not close to there yet.
And if we don’t get those vaccine doses ordered and sent before the end of the year, it has two really big impacts for us in the United States. Number one, if we don’t get that global delivery, it means the vaccine won’t be able to stop continual and more mutations from the virus, meaning that new viruses that could be much worse than Delta Plus or the Delta variant will come back to the United States. And number two, the International Monetary Fund, the most powerful agency on global economic forecasting akin to the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund predicts if we don’t get global vaccination done by the end of the year, the global economy is going to lose $9 trillion. So it’s incredibly significant. And most of that $9 trillion loss will be felt by wealthy countries that include the United States.
SCOTT HARRIS: Eric, where is the world right now in terms of raising the funds needed to get the vaccines to everyone who has to get one in addition to waiving the patent rights? But as I understand it, it’s not just the patents, but also releasing the proprietary technology to produce these vaccines, which is one step beyond the patents themselves.
ERIC LECOMPTE: That’s right. And I think taking those questions in perhaps reverse order, waiving the intellectual property on the vaccine recipe, so to speak, that’s a first step, and that’s going to help. But it doesn’t go far enough in terms of all of the access to proprietary knowledge that more of a startup pharmaceutical company would need. So that is an issue. This is something that can certainly help and get access to more vaccines. There’s going to need to be additional decisions that are made by the World Trade Organization. And also, it’s clear that the work we’re doing now, not only to help this current crisis, which I think will be a health and economic crisis for several years to come, that we’re going to be facing as a global community, but also to start to put in place structures to prevent the next crisis.
Now, in terms of how much money we need to raise to also be able to get vaccines out there, that’s a another really big piece. So, there’s been the COVAX initiative. And then also the initiative that the IMF and other financial institutions have launched to raise $50 billion to support global vaccination efforts. Right now, it’s at about $37 billion, but it’s been very slow to get up to that point where it needs to be to deliver a significant amount of vaccines. But in terms of when we look at that big number of 11 billion doses needing to be delivered to vaccinate 70 percent of the world’s population, we realized that, you know, we don’t even have anything in place to get us halfway there. If we’re looking at the United Nations numbers that in terms of what’s been delivered around the world right now, only 15.5 percent of the entire world’s population has been vaccinated. So we are really in a desperate place to get the financing in place, the aid in place, as well as changing global trade policy in order to facilitate global vaccine distribution. And if we don’t do it means all over the world and here in the United States, we’re going to continue to deal with a prolonged health crisis and a prolonged economic crisis.
Learn more about the urgent campaign to close the global COVID vaccine access gap by visiting the Jubilee USA Network at jubileeusa.org.
