More than 300 Covid vaccine candidates are in development and 200m doses have been jabbed in the arms of citizens. But those people are overwhelmingly found in just a few of the world’s richest countries. For the rest of the more than 5 billion adults around the world, things are less hopeful. They face a wait of up to three years, if they can get a jab at all.
As the Guardian’s international correspondent Michael Safi tells Anushka Asthana, there is potential for the huge economic global divide to feed directly into a two-tier system of vaccinations. For the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, this represents a catastrophic moral failure.
Writing in the Guardian, he said the me-first approach of rich countries might serve short-term political interests but would ultimately be self-defeating. Until the virus is under control across the globe, it will remain a threat everywhere. But is that a message politicians can sell to voters?
Photograph: Daniel Irungu/EPA
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