This spring, American epidemiologist Seth Berkley had to break some bad news to the world’s poorest countries: millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses promised to them weren’t coming.
The nations were counting on getting shots from Covax—a multibillion-dollar program to immunize the world, led by Dr. Berkley and championed by the World Health Organization. But shipments from Covax’s main supplier in India, where Covid-19 cases were surging, suddenly weren’t coming through.
Tens of millions of hospital workers who had received one dose were unexpectedly no longer scheduled for a second. The prospects for quickly inoculating other front-line workers and vulnerable people were fading fast.
The Covax program, conceived in early 2020 as a kind of Operation Warp Speed for the globe, was supposed to be a model for how to vaccinate humanity, starting with those who needed it the most. The plan was scheduled to have the developing world’s entire healthcare workforce immunized by now.
Instead, the idealistic undertaking to inoculate nearly a billion people collided with reality, foiled by a basic instinct for nations to put their own populations first, and a shortage of manufacturing capacity around the world.
