On COVAX

So, what happened to COVAX?

There were a lot of promises made.

Between private sector innovation, public funding, and the partnership called COVAX, millions of people around the world were supposed to be vaccinated by now. Especially in the continent of Africa.

It was supposed to be so simple.

Until it wasn’t.

Vaccines are going to waste in the Western World, while people in countries across Africa still wait for their first shots. Less than 10% of Africans are vaccinated— “well short of the African Union’s goal of 60% by the end of the year”.

In a recent episode of Global Insider, Strive Masiyiwa, the head of the African Union’s vaccination efforts, sat down with host Ryan Heath to discuss, why the continent can no longer rely on donations and vaccines produced abroad and “why the only thing left to do is to build out a vaccine infrastructure back home.”

COVAX was predicated on the idea of a global initiative in which all the poorer countries of the international community would gain fair access to vaccines as they become available.

Masiyiwa describes sitting down with COVAX leadership to discuss the targets for the continent (remember the goal was 60% by the first year), yet COVAX lowballed the target: 5% to 20%. This was in part because the U.S wasn’t really engaging at the time, and so they were gauging access with the continent of Europe. Eventually, President Macron suggested a 50-50 deal: after canvassing with other leaders of the AU, he suggested that Europe will pay for half of the vaccines, while the AU buys the other half.

So of course, the AU is reaching out to manufacturers and suppliers— but to their shock, they were told from suppliers that they’ve already sold their stock for 2021. “There is nothing available.”

So here is one problem and one misconception: we think that the AU had to strictly rely on donations, but they were ready to buy. They had the money. But suppliers had already sold their stock to the wealthiest nations of the world: mainly in the West.

“At the end of the day vaccines are not expensive. We might be poor but we have a GDP of 2.5 trillion, we can go out to buy vaccines. And we had $2 billion cash to buy vaccines.”

Masiyiwa describes this as an equity probably between Western nations and the rest of the world: “We get them first. And when we’re done saving our own people, well then attend to you.”

With no vaccines available for 2021, the AU is forced at the back of the queue. Eventually, the AU was able to get its hands on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, because one of its global supply plants was located in South Africa. Ironically this plant was made for global distribution until the AU could twist their arm: “how can you produce on the African continent and ship to Europe?”

The AU even went to the White House to ask the U.S to delay some of its purchases so that they could get to the front of the counter for a few months. They were able to do a queue swap with the U.S and purchase vaccines— this happened about three or four weeks ago under the Biden Administration.

Problem 2: decentralizing production

Masiyiwa says the problem we have is very simple:

“the donor community created an institution called Gavi and they get money each year to buy vaccines. They buy vaccines and distribute them. This is before COVID. The problem with that is that it had an unintended consequence. The unintended consequence is that Gavi would go to India, buy vaccines in India, and deliver them to Africa for free. Which meant that African manufacturers could not get into the game. As a result, there is a vaccine industrial complex in India which was supposed to serve everybody else.”

Ryan Heath interjects to talk about how this fell apart:

“the Dela variant comes along and completely disrupts that supply arrangement. Whereas they had intended to export the majority of what they are producing there, the Indian government, did what naturally any national government would do— Delta is out of control, we need those doses for us, and that has a knock-off effect for what Africa could receive.”

Masiyiwa says that Africa needs its own production assets on the ground and fixing the entire Gavi infrastructure.

And what better time than now. During a crisis, generosity and distribution structures should not get in the way for a continent to pull itself out of pandemic.

I would also argue that patents on the vaccines should be lifted and transparent but I guess that’s a conversation for another day.

Act It Outelina morrisonComment