In the race to vaccinate the world against Covid-19, developing countries are dangerously lagging behind, as virus mutations make it harder to catch up, a situation that could mean at least another year. of humanitarian and economic misery for poor nations.
The United States has administered vaccine doses to approximately 12% of its population, while Europe has reached about 5%. But in South America, only 1.8% of the population had received a vaccine this week, while Asia reached 1.5% and Africa 0.1%, according to Our World in Data, a project based at Oxford University.
Nearly 130 countries have not yet administered a single dose, the World Health Organization recently said. Only two countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the Seychelles and Mauritius, have begun vaccinating a substantial proportion of front-line workers, although others are likely to launch shots in the coming days.
The critical scope of vaccines for the poorest nations runs the risk of being further limited by the emergence of new variants of the virus, including in South Africa and Brazil, which appear to cause some of the vaccines to be have ensured they are less effective. Large areas of Africa and some Latin American and Asian countries are unlikely to cover most of their populations before 2023 or 2024, according to experts.
All this means that it could be years before life returns to normal in the poorest countries, which saw more than 100 million people fall back into extreme poverty last year and have no resources to trigger the government spending as much as rich countries. Some emerging market countries that were able to boost national stimulus last year are running out of resources to continue.