“Funding is a perennial concern, even in pandemic response,” says Ms. One way to speed up the vaccine rollout, and the delivery from urban warehouses to remote areas is, quite simply, cash. “We want to ensure that no-one misses out,” says Gian Gandhi, UNICEF’s global COVAX coordinator, “but, in the short term, the concentration of doses in cities at least means that the vaccination of health and other frontline workers in urban areas, where the higher population density puts them at a higher risk of exposure, is being prioritized.”ģ) More funding is needed to help rollout in the poorest countries While all of the countries that are part of COVAX have the infrastructure needed to get pallets of vaccines off cargo planes and into refrigerated warehouses, the next steps can be more complicated. From the ingredients needed to produce the vaccine, to the glass and plastic stoppers and tubes, to the syringes.īecause of this, export bans or controls on any of these products can cause major disruptions to vaccine rollouts.Ģ) Getting vaccines to those who need them is not easy
Getting doses into people’s arms requires a complex global supply chain. Several countries also placed export controls on vaccines, prompting WHO to warn against “vaccine nationalism”, which encourages hoarding, and has the effect of pushing prices up and ultimately prolonging the pandemic, the restrictions needed to contain it, and human and economic suffering. Its foresight paid off: countries put export controls on syringes, prices spiked, and supplies were limited. Here are five things to know about the challenges facing COVAX, and how they can be overcome.Įarly on in the pandemic, UNICEF built up a stockpile of half a billion syringes in warehouses outside the countries producing them. The Global COVAX Facility is the only global initiative that is working with governments and manufacturers to ensure COVID-19 vaccines are available worldwide to both higher-income and lower-income countries. "The current ‘me first’ approach will ultimately cost more, in terms of lives," says Diane Abad-Vergara, COVAX communication focal point, WHO.
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