In an interesting choice of venues, Bill Gates has just published his latest editorial in the Nikkei Asian Review, the English-language flagship of the Japanese financial publishing and data giant. In it, the billionaire Microsoft founder argues that the US and its European allies should dedicate more government funds for guaranteeing supplies of vaccines for poorer countries, which don't have the wherewithal to strike deals...
Hoarding supplies of vaccines isn't just wrong, Gates argues, it's counterproductive - since the only way we can truly eradicate COVID-19 is to vaccinate everyone, in every country.
But it's not just a question of donating supplies. The Western world and its leading corporations must collaborate with government to start ramping up supply chains to ensure that production of billions of doses of the vaccine can be produced quickly once emergency approval has been granted.
Because we can immunize against the disease, governments will be able to lift social distancing measures. People will stop having to wear masks. The world's economy will start running again at full speed.
But elimination will not happen by itself. To achieve this goal, the world first needs three things: the capacity to produce billions of vaccine doses, the funding to pay for them, and systems to deliver them.
Right now, most of the world's supply of COVID-19 vaccines is slated to go to rich countries. These nations have been making deals with pharmaceutical companies, securing the right to buy billions of doses as soon as they are produced.
But what about low- and lower-middle income nations of the world, everywhere from South Sudan to Nicaragua to Myanmar? These nations are home to nearly half of all human beings, and they do not have the purchasing power to make big deals with pharmaceutical companies. As things stand now, these countries will be able to cover, at most, 14% of their people.
To support his case, Gates cites new modeling from Northeastern projecting that the death toll will be twice as high if vaccines aren't widely distributed in the developing world.
New modeling from Northeastern University helps illustrate what will happen if vaccine distribution is so unequal. The researchers there analyzed two scenarios. In one, vaccines are given to countries based on their population size. Then there is another scenario that approximates what is happening now: 50 rich countries get the first two billion doses of vaccine. In this scenario, the virus continues to spread unchecked for four months in three quarters of the world. And almost twice as many people die.
This would be a huge moral failing. A vaccine can make COVID-19 a preventable disease, and no one should die from a preventable disease simply because the country they live in cannot afford to secure a manufacturing deal. But you do not even have to care about fairness to see the problem with the "rich-country-only" scenario.
The best way to close this vaccine gap is not by shaming rich countries. They are doing something perfectly understandable -- trying to protect their people. Instead, we need to vastly increase the world's vaccine manufacturing capacity. This way, we can cover everyone no matter where they live.
While President Trump's "Operation Warp Speed" handed billions of dollars to vaccine developers, Gates claims that the UK and Japan, which have both publicly promised to set aside vaccine supplies for poorer nations, should be emulated by other western nations - cough, the US, cough.
But it's not enough to simply manufacture the vaccines, an endeavor that would likely cost billions upon billions of dollars. The west should help the developing world create a network of on-the-ground health-care workers around the world to help administer the vaccines, and report any new threats of zoological transmission.
There are, in effect, three parts to Gates' plan, as he teases in the headline: vaccines are the only solution (not "herd immunity" - God forbid), going "global" is the only right way to do it, and - most importantly - more public money is needed to make it happen.
Typically, self-interest and altruism require opposite behaviors, but in this rare case, Gates argues, the altruistic thing is also an act of self-interest, since the only way we can eradicate COVID-19 would be to ensure the entire world is vaccinated, spending public money on vaccines bound for poorer nations makes sense.
In other words, in eliminating COVID-19, we can also build the system that will help reduce the damage of the next pandemic.
