Vaccine Leadership Not Chauvinism

Context: Global community needs a hard introspection by scientific and political leadership during the critical phase of recovery from Covid-19.

Challenges in Fight Against Covid-19

• Unpredictable and mutating nature of virus:
  • It is not clear if antibodies will last beyond a few months as mutating virus is learning faster to find weak spots in our immune system to spread faster.
  • The UK, South Africa and Brazil variants of the virus are found to be more infectious because antibodies cannot detect them.
• Global vaccine divide:
  • As of now, some 30 million vaccine doses have been administered mostly in advanced economies.
  • World Health Organization (WHO) initiative to provide equitable access to vaccines (COVAX) is devoid of the funds.
• Lack of scientific cooperation: in terms of vaccine trials
  • For instance, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine has been cleared for use in the UK and India, but it is still awaiting the green signal from the EU, the US, and the WHO’s internal process.

Way Forward: Ensure global cooperation and credibility in the institutions of decision-making through following measures-

• Enable equitable global distribution of vaccines: based on the principle of inter-dependence as inequity means that the virus will remain with us after mutation.
• Global pooling of national scientific resources: to ensure speed and scale of the intervention while ensuring that the vaccine is both efficacious and safe.
• Transparency of clinical trial data: Drug regulators of the world need to come together to scrutinise the clinical trial data and ensure full disclosure of clinical trial data by making it available to the public.

Conclusion: More information, strong institutions with credibility and more democracy is a must for ensuring vaccine leadership and not vaccine chauvinism.