WHO warns COVAX might face vaccine shortfall in June-July

A shortfall in COVID-19 vaccine doses going through the COVAX program in June and July should undermine the efficiency of the roll-out, the World Health Organization stated Friday.

COVAX was set up to make sure equitable distribution of vaccines, especially to low-earnings countries, and has already delivered extra 80 million doses to 129 territories.

But that is “about 200 million doses behind where we want to be”, Bruce Aylward, the WHO’s COVAX frontman, told reporters in Geneva.

So while wealthy countries had guaranteed to give some 150 million doses so far on top of the doses COVAX obtains with donated funds that would not resolve the problem.

“We are setting up for failure if we don’t get early doses. We are not on track yet: we don’t have enough doses from enough countries early enough to get the world on track to get out of this,” Aylward said.

While the pledges to donate 150 million doses through COVAX was a “great start”, Aylward said there were “two big problems”.

“Number one, very little is committed to the June-July period, which means we’re going to still have this gap,” Aylward said.

“The other problem is just the volume. If we are going to get on track to get at least 30-40% of the world population vaccinated this year we got to get another 250 million people vaccinated between now and the end of September.”

Supply problems

COVAX is a global scheme co-led by the WHO, Gavi, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.

It intends to procure sufficient vaccines for 30 percent of the populace in 92 of the poorest collaborating territories — 20% in India — with donors masking the cost. COVAX has been hit by inequalities within worldwide vaccine roll-out, however, additionally shipping delays.

AstraZeneca shots making up 97% of doses provided so far — the rest being Pfizer-BioNTech. The Serum Institute of India, generating AstraZeneca doses, was to make it the spine of COVAX’s delivery chain.

However, New Delhi limited vaccine exports to fight a devastating domestic surge. SII stated Wednesday that it was hoping to renew supplies to COVAX over the next few months. COVAX turned into the installation to fight the probability of wealthy nations buying up maximum available vaccine doses — which passed off as predicted.

The sector hit the milestone of billion Covid-19 vaccines having been injected around the sector. But of these doses, 37% were administered in high-profit nations accounting for sixteen percent of the worldwide populace. Just 0.3 percentage were administered within the 29 lowest-profit nations, home to 9 percent of the world’s people.

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