Nearly one in four people may not get Covid-19 vaccines until at least 2022 because rich countries with less than 15% of the global population have reserved 51% of the doses of the most promising vaccines, researchers said on Tuesday.
Low- and middle-income countries - home to more than 85% of the world’s population - would have to share the remainder, said researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States.
An effective response to the pandemic requires high-income countries “to share in an equitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines across the world”, they wrote.
“The uncertainty over global access to Covid-19 vaccines traces not only to ongoing clinical testing, but also from the failure of governments and vaccine manufacturers to be more transparent and accountable over these arrangements,” they added.
As of November 15, high-income nations had pre-ordered nearly 7.5 billion doses of vaccines from 13 manufacturers, the paper said.