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Until everybody is safe, nobody is safe

The case for vaccinating everybody

Scientists have developed safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines much faster than was first predicted.

This astounding scientific and logistical feat has the power to save and transform billions of lives, but that progress will be in vain if we cannot ensure they are made quickly available for everybody, everywhere.

This isn’t easy—it requires a robust combination of urgency, political will, technology, money, and manufacturing, logistical and administrative capacity—but it is possible.

At the moment it’s not happening. Enough COVID-19 vaccines were produced in 2021 to cover 70 percent of every country in the world. However, most of that is reserved for the well-off.

As of February 2022, 68 percent of people in high-income countries had received at least one dose of the vaccine. Poorer countries have vaccinated about 12 percent.

At this pace, many low- and middle-income countries won’t have widespread coverage until 2024-2025.

And rich countries are not just taking vaccines, they are also hoarding them, a move that World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has called a “catastrophic moral failure”.

The stakes could not be higher, and not just for poorer countries. Failure to vaccinate everybody is drawing out the pandemic and allowing new variants to flourish, putting everybody back in danger.

L to R: Failure to vaccinate everybody is drawing out the pandemic and allowing new variants to flourish, putting everyone back in danger; Health workers in queue for COVID-19 vaccination in Mumbai India, Feb 2021.

The more things change

We have seen this kind of moral failure before, in the response to the HIV pandemic, where the gap between rich and poor treatment lagged by more than a decade.

The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access initiative, COVAX, led by WHO, GAVI and UNICEF was created to ensure that mistake was not repeated.

Launched in April 2020, it's an international initiative comprised of governments, health organizations, businesses, civil society and philanthropists working to ensure equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Yet although COVAX has distributed more than 951 million vaccines, rich country hoarding, chronic under-investment, along with supply challenges have stopped it from doing all that it could.

UNDP is committed to working closely with the UN family and partners to ensure everybody receives a COVID-19 vaccine as quickly as possible. Not only is it the right thing to do, it also makes economic sense.

Vaccine inequity is undermining recovery. It could cost an already damaged world economy up to US$1.2 trillion a year—or enough to provide basic social protection and health care to all.

Overall it’s estimated the pandemic could cost US$9.2 trillion.

UNDP is working to ensure that vaccines are not the preserve of a privileged minority.

We work with The Global Fund to prepare countries for crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

L to R: A vaccine centre, Mumbai, May 2021; Girls play in Kibera Slums as Kenya announces its third wave of COVID-19, Mar 2021; A volunteer sprays disinfectant a month before the first COVID-19 vaccines are given, Johannesburg, South Africa, Nov 2021.

“Flooded with false narratives”

The decision whether or not to get a vaccine sometimes doesn’t just rest on availability.

Across the globe, people have refused to get vaccinated because they have had wrong information about their safety or efficacy, or because of religious convictions.

Those hardest hit by the pandemic are often those most likely to be skeptical of vaccination. UNDP Argentina’s Accelerator Lab is working on ways to counter vaccine mistrust in communities with lower formal education levels.

Roma communities living in informal settlements in Serbia haven’t had all the information required to make accurate decisions about vaccines and COVID-19, so UNDP is working with volunteers and local leaders on education and outreach.

UNDP volunteers provide COVID vaccine information to the Roma community, March 2021, Serbia.

It’s not over

Millions of people have died. Hundreds of millions have fallen sick. Economies and lives have been shattered.

COVID-19 has taught us—at a terrible human cost—that we all live on one small planet and our fate is in each others’ hands.

And it is still not done with us. Another wave is threatening many countries and that wave could, as the virus mutates, crash over the world once more.

The world can only recover from the COVID-19 crisis if there is fairer and faster access to vaccines for everyone.

It’s time to speed up the global effort to ensure every country has the tools and resources to get the virus under control.

Photos from top to bottom: i_am_zews/Shutterstock; Parikh Mahendra N/Shutterstock; Pratik Chorge/Hindustan Times via Getty Images; Donwilson Odhiambo/Getty Images; Guillem Sartorio/Bloomberg via Getty Images; UNDP Serbia

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Until everybody is safe, nobody is safe

The case for vaccinating everybody

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