The Folly of World-Wide Covid Vaccination

The pandemic stole focus from other, deadlier diseases, including HIV/AIDS in the developing world.

By Allysia Finley. 

"President Biden is asking Congress for $5 billion to pay for a global Covid vaccination campaign. The goal, set by the World Health Organization, is to vaccinate 70% of the population in every country. But other infectious diseases that are much deadlier than Covid in low-income countries have taken a back seat during the pandemic. It’s time to reset public-health priorities.

Vaccinating the world against Covid won’t prevent new variants from emerging, because vaccines don’t prevent the virus from spreading. Vaccines can slow transmission for a short period at best. The most effective vaccines provide only short-term protection against infection and even less against the Omicron variant. Large shares of lower-income countries already have natural immunity from infection, which is as protective as vaccines. A recent study estimated that some 65% of Africans had Covid antibodies as of last fall. The share is probably much higher now.

Covid ranks low on the list of public-health threats in Africa. A little more than 250,000 Africans have died from Covid. That’s not even close to the number of Africans who died in 2019 from non-Covid lower respiratory infections, diarrheal diseases such as cholera, HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis. Africa has been spared high death rates because the population is so young. Covid preys mainly on the old, those with weakened immune systems and, to a lesser extent, people with such chronic conditions as diabetes and heart disease.

“Many countries have lost substantial ground in providing routine immunizations, preventive services, and chronic disease management,” notes a recent report by Duke University and the Covid Collaborative. Clinics that normally provide childhood immunizations and treatments for other infectious diseases have been administering Covid vaccines instead. The logistics of vaccine distribution have also diverted critical resources from things like HIV prevention, testing and treatment. While the U.S. has donated hundreds of millions of mRNA vaccines to low-income countries, these must be stored at frigid temperatures and usually administered within hours once vials are opened. Many doses have been thrown out or simply can’t be distributed. 

Yet the WHO continues to push its 70% vaccination goal in the name of equity. Only last fall the WHO was berating wealthy countries for boosting their own populations while most low-income countries remained unvaccinated. The Biden administration sought to deflect this criticism by lambasting Moderna for not donating more vaccines. But even then African countries were struggling to distribute their donated vaccines. Now the world is awash in vaccines, and demand has petered out in low-income countries.

“I’m surprised that there are some in the global health community who see the 70% target as no longer relevant,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus recently said. “If the world’s rich are enjoying the benefits of high vaccine coverage, why shouldn’t the world’s poor?” The Biden administration agrees. It’s in the “national interest to vaccinate the world and protect against any possible future variant,” White House Covid czar Jeff Zients said last week.

Increasing access to HIV treatments could actually do more than a global vaccination campaign to halt the spread of Covid in low-income countries. It’s thought that the novel coronavirus uses immuno-compromised patients suffering with prolonged infections to help incubate new variants. If the Biden administration really wants to advance the cause of global public health, it should support U.S. drug makers that are developing vaccines for other, more deadly infectious diseases."