Vaccine for all, rich and poor

Scott Morrison was right on Sunday to pledge strong Australian backing for Group of 20 efforts to ensure the fair and equitable rollout of COVID-19 vaccines across the world. The pandemic’s horrifying scourge, with global infections surging towards 59 million and deaths approaching 1.4 million, leaves no doubt about the importance of the World Health Organisation’s warning, echoed widely at the G20’s virtual summit hosted by Saudi Arabia, that “no one will be safe until we are all safe”. This is a crucial test for effective and co-ordinated international co-operation.

The urgent need, as Mr Morrison emphasised to the G20 summit and last Friday’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit, is to ensure no country, however poor, is left behind. Developed and developing nations, he insisted, must all be assured of early access to safe vaccines. Otherwise, the pandemic will be prolonged with ongoing dire consequences for the global economic recovery.

As the forum of the world’s biggest economies, the G20 has a crucial role to play in seeing that even small nations with weak health infrastructure and economies severely battered by the pandemic get adequate vaccine supplies. The summit’s pledge of an additional $4.5bn to plug a gap in funding for vaccine development should go some way towards ensuring the sort of equitable global rollout Mr Morrison envisions.

But there is a long way to go. Hopefully, the Prime Minister’s appeal to fellow G20 members to follow Australia and increase their contributions to COVAX, the global vaccine access facility, which estimates it will need to provide two billion doses by the end of next year, will not fall on deaf ears. COVAX has been hampered, however, by the failure of big economies such as the US and China to sign up and support it. It is no surprise, as outgoing US President Donald Trump has made clear, that some countries that have funded vaccine research want priority access to doses that pharmaceutical companies are now manufacturing. But they will be shortsighted if they fail to help ensure the global availability of a vaccine.

At the G20 summit, Mr Trump conspicuously absented himself from the pandemic discussion. He played golf instead. It is a pity he did so, not only because of the way COVID-19 is raging through the US, one of the most badly affected countries in the world, but also because this is clearly no time for narrow-minded nationalism in dealing with the virus. An immediate issue for president-elect Joe Biden will be to decide whether to end Mr Trump’s boycott and get the US, with its vast resources, back into COVAX and the global battle. It is imperative Mr Biden does so. As Mr Morrison told the summit, there is a pathway out of the pandemic and it lies in the widest possible distribution of a safe and effective vaccine to rich and poor countries alike.