Vaccines Are Being Shipped to Low-Income Countries, But Are They Actually Reaching People?

This week, I read an article in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/24/vaccine-distribution-logistics-inequality-access/) that discusses vaccine inequity in low and middle income countries. It discusses how millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccines have been shipped to low-resource countries through the Covax program, but that there is a lot of uncertainty around whether or not these doses are actually reaching people. 

The author of the article critiques the global COVID vaccine strategy, arguing that it is not enough to just ship vaccines to poorer countries. Those vaccines will be of no use unless there are adequate supply chains and health infrastructure programs that can help to distribute and administer the shots. One statistic that shocked me was that 32 low income countries have used less than half of the vaccines that have been delivered to them. For instance, Burkina Faso has used just 27%, Somalia has used just 26%, and Burundi has used less than 1%. This could be explained by the spending of the World Bank, which allocated less than 15% of its vaccine assistance program towards distribution. 

I really appreciated this article because it reminded me of something I learned in my global child health class last quarter. Our teacher told us about an invention called the “Soccket”, which was a soccer ball that generated energy when it was kicked. The goal was that children in poor communities could play with the Soccket during the day, and then families could use the energy to power the electricity in their homes. The inventors dropped off a bunch of Soccket balls in these communities and left. When they returned years later, they were surprised to find that the balls had never been used. The purpose of this story is to show that simply dropping off resources is not enough to solve the problem of equity.

Another point that the author brought up was the argument that the low uptake of vaccines in poor countries is caused by vaccine hesitancy. The author describes how, actually, poor countries have around the same rates of vaccine hesitancy as high-income countries like the United States. In my opinion, reducing the problem to “vaccine hesitancy” puts blame on individuals in these communities, framing them as lazy rather than understanding that the supply chains may not be reaching them or their local clinics may not have the resources to provide vaccines. There probably are high levels of vaccine hesitancy in these communities, but that hesitancy may also result from complex relationships between people and their government, which are problems that definitely exist in the United States as well.

Ensuring that vaccines actually reach people in these countries will not be an easy feat. Now that vaccines have been delivered, I think organizations like the World Bank, GAVI, and WHO should focus on distribution and supporting overburdened healthcare workers/systems. As we have learned with the Delta and Omicron variants, reaching high levels of vaccination globally will be crucial to ending the pandemic, but it will require better coordination and attention at both global and local levels. 

-Sophia (Week 3)