Gates Package — page 1044

Vaccines significantly reduce the risk of severe disease and death. Yet vaccination rates have divided, heartbreakingly, along income lines. In 2021, more than half of the world's population received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine. In low-income countries, only 7 percent did-- and even worse, young, healthy people in rich countries who aren't likely to get sick or die from COVID were getting vaccines before older people and frontline workers in poorer countries, who were at much higher risk.20 <~?~Insert art 030_Gate_9780593534489_art_r1> Vaccine inequity. As of October 2021, people living in wealthier countries had far greater access to COVID-19 vaccines than people living in poorer ones. (Our World in Data, UN Population Division) It's natural to think we could close these inequities by allocating the doses we have more fairly. Certainly, rich countries deserve credit for sharing more than a billion doses with poorer countries during COVID, as do COVAX and the WHO for their efforts. But the gaps they tried to fill were enormous. And sharing doses in itself is not a permanent solution--we can't assume that countries will always do that. How many politicians would be willing to tell young voters they can't be vaccinated because the doses are going to another country, at a time when schools were still closed and people were still dying? That's why I think that, rather than focusing primarily on reallocation, the more practical approach is to focus on making more doses--so many that the question of who should be able to draw from a limited supply is no longer an acute issue. In 2021, the White House published a smart plan with ambitious goals:21 Develop and test a safe, effective vaccine within 100 days of recognizing a threat, and be able to produce enough for all Americans 30 days after that and for