If we can vaccinate the world, we can beat the climate crisis

• It would only cost $50bn to ensure 40% of the world's population is vaccinated by the end of the year, and 60% by the first half of 2022. This is a recent estimate from the IMF, the latest institution to join a chorus of voices calling for a global vaccination programme to bring COVID-19 under control. The IMF has highlighted the economic benefits of global vaccines, which would be huge. But there is another powerful reason for a worldwide campaign
• Vaccinating the world will be crucial if countries are going to act together to confront the climate crisis, which will require many of the same things as delivering vaccines: resources, innovation, ingenuity and a true partnership between rich and developing countries. The COP26 climate conference in November will be an opportune moment for building this partnership. But to do so, rich countries need to deliver on their early promises to deliver global vaccines.
• As it stands today, vaccine access is deeply unequal. The U.S. is starting to vaccinate children, even as health workers and elderly people are waiting for shots in most of the world. At the end of April, less than 2% of the population of Africa had been vaccinated, while 40% of the population of the U.S. and 20% of the population of Europe had received at least one dose. India, one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world, has fully vaccinated 3% of its population, and is still in the middle of a nightmarish second wave that has forced the country to stop exports of all vaccines.
• It was clear for some time that this was where things were heading. Despite all the talk of solidarity at the beginning of the pandemic, rich countries built sufficient capacity to produce only enough vaccines for themselves and then proceeded to corner the world's supplies. By March, high-income countries accounting for 16% of the world's population had bought up 50% of vaccine doses. As of this month, only 80m of the 2bn vaccines promised to the world's poorest through the ACT accelerator, a partnership including the UN-backed COVAX scheme, have been delivered. The reason? A combination of insufficient donor funs and competition for vaccine doses from the richest countries, who can afford to pay high prices if needed, and who are planning to stockpile millions of extra doses for the future. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation estimates that rich countries will have up to a billion extra doses on hand by the end of this year.
• These inequities were mirrored by what happened with economic policiy. While rich countries borrowed massively and spent more than 20% of GDP to help their populations ride out the crisis, poor countries could afford to spend only 2% of GDP. An estimated 100 million more people are now living in extreme poverty compared to the start of the pandemic. Developing countries contemplating lockdown are caught in a double bind between economic disaster (in India for example, the first lockdown cost the country almost a quarter of its GDP) and overflowing morgues and mortuaries.
• The catastrophic moral failure on the part of rich countries to help poorer nations can only reinforce the strong suspicion in much of the developing world that, despite talk of global cooperation and shared fortunes, when push comes to shove its everyone for themselves. This could be devastating for global efforts against the climate crisis. The success of COP26 depends in part upon larger developing countries such as Bangladesh China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Paksitan committing to sacrifices that will only pay off if countries such as the U.S., UK, Germany, France and Canada can be relied upon to stick to their own commitments.