The latest supply forecast for Covax – the programme for sharing COVID-19 vaccines around the world – suggests that accelerating vaccination in low-income countries looks unlikely. Covax estimates it will have distributed 1.425 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021, significantly less than the 2 billion doses it was aiming for earlier this year.
A major problem has been getting a good place in the vaccine queue. While Covax was raising money following its launch in June 2020, many high-income countries were already buying up much of the initial supply from manufacturers. Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), argues that despite providing it with financial support, the world’s biggest economies have thus undermined Covax.
