The U.N.'s Covax is likely to deliver less than half of the promised 2 billion vaccine doses to help the world’s neediest icountries in 2021.

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Tue, 2021-12-14 01:36 — mike kraft

Covax promised 2 billion vaccine doses to help the world’s neediest in 2021. It won’t even deliver even half that. The U.N.-led initiative is now aiming for 800 million doses to be delivered by the end of the year, but that isn't assured. Adam Taylor Washington Post

Covax, an expansive vaccine-sharing initiative to get coronavirus vaccine doses to low- and middle-income nations, once pledged to deliver more than 2 billion shots worldwide by the end of the year. But as the days tick down, it is scrambling to deliver well under half that figure.

The initiative, led by the United Nations, is now racing to deliver 800 million doses by the end of the year, according to interviews with senior officials involved in Covax, which includes the World Health Organization and other groups. Even if that benchmark is met, it will be a far cry from the 2.3 billion doses hoped for in January by a program designed to counter a glut of vaccines in wealthy nations.

Covax lowered its estimate of doses delivered in 2021 to between 800 million and 1 billion doses late this year after a range of complications with supply and delivery. Omicron, a variant first detected in southern Africa, has added urgency to the need for vaccines, but also disrupted shipping and could upend Covax’s hopes for more regular shipments in 2022.

Poorer nations won't get boosters soon as wealthy countries surge ahead, says Covax architech

Though the organization was set up to pool money to purchase its own doses from a variety of manufacturers, many of those orders were delayed in the first part of the year, and the organization increasingly relies upon donations from the United States and other wealthy countries of vaccines including the AstraZeneca-Oxford, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson jabs. The Biden administration pledged in September to donate or facilitate the purchase of 1.1 billion doses to Covax, though many of those doses are not expected to arrive until next year. ...

Covax officials downplayed the significance of the final 2021 number. But some critics of the organization said it was further proof that Covax had failed to live up to the expectations it set in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Covax is not on track to meeting its modest targets, let alone vaccinating the world,” said Zain Rizvi, a researcher with consumer rights advocacy group Public Citizen. “This failure reflects the yawning gap between the rhetoric and reality of global vaccine access.”

Meeting the 800 million doses threshold will be a push, even though deliveries through Covax have been increasing.

By the end of November, Covax had delivered 596 million doses around the world, according to a dashboard of vaccine deliveries maintained by UNICEF. To get out 800 million doses this year, Covax would need to deliver more than 200 million doses this month — more than any monthly level so far. ...

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