Inequality in Access to Essential Health and Medicine: COVID-19 Vaccines

Before the pandemic, the Asia Pacific region enjoyed the steepest human development growth globally. However, the progress is uneven within the region especially in respect to development in health and the access to essential health and medicine. One and a half years after the virus struck, high-income countries have deals securing enough doses to vaccinate their populations twice over, while in many low-income countries fewer than one in 100 people had received a single dose of vaccine. The report showed that parallel vaccination flattens the pandemic curve more effectively, enabling earlier easing of lockdown measures. Uneven re-opening of the economies was predicted to cause massive inflationary pressures from protracted disruption of global supply chains. The findings argue for a better strategy to coordinate global vaccine production and distribution or other factors driving health inequality in the future.