While rich countries are struggling to vaccinate their own populations as quickly as possible and are fighting over global distribution, people in the developing world face the prospect that COVID-19 vaccinations may still be years away. The Biden administration must take immediate steps to fix this problem and bring the pandemic under control while gaining a moral and diplomatic victory, or it will face a presidential term defined by a pandemic that will not end.
As of November 2020, 14 percent of the world’s population had bought up more than 50 percent of promised vaccine doses. By one best-case scenario, just 40 percent of doses might be left for the rest of the world at the end of 2021. This assumes rich countries don’t increase orders and that all of the vaccine production candidates are actually approved.
