Imagine if, in a year’s time, 300m doses of a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine have been manufactured in Donald Trump’s America, Xi Jinping’s China or Boris Johnson’s Britain. Who is going to get them? What are the chances that a nurse in India, or a doctor in Brazil, let alone a bus driver in Nigeria or a diabetic in Tanzania, will be given priority? The answer must be virtually nil.
The ugly battle between nations over limited supplies of tests and personal protective equipment will be a sideshow compared to the scramble over a vaccine. Yet if a vaccine is to be anything like the silver bullet that some imagine, it will have to be available to the world’s poor as well as to its rich.
Any vaccine should be deployed to create the maximum possible benefit to public health. That will mean prioritising doctors, nurses and other frontline workers, as well as those most vulnerable to the disease, no matter where they live or how much they can afford.