 Welcome to News Clicks Show Mapping Fault Lines where we look at geopolitical issues across the world. Today we are going to be looking at a very different kind of fault line December 30th marks the first anniversary of the WHO declaring COVID-19 as a public health emergency of international concern. Now one year later we see the numbers over 90.8 million doses of the vaccine or various vaccines have been delivered across the world. Over the year a lot of questions have been raised on the kind of global order that has emerged out of this pandemic about the WHO itself, about the distribution of vaccines, about the relationships between countries on this and we have with us Prabir Prakash to talk about this. Prabir, thank you so much for joining us. So first of all the key question here is vaccines. As we see this chart does not paint a very inspiring picture because of course the data is not available for many countries but nonetheless it doesn't really look like a large number of people across the globe are close to getting the vaccines or are getting these vaccines whereas some sections are really getting them in large numbers. So could you first maybe take us through the kind of dynamics of this distribution of vaccines right now. Let's take a little step back and look at the pandemic itself in the last one year. We are now approaching 1 million deaths. We also see that even in the United States where according to this map vaccines are getting increasingly available or in UK for instance or in the European Union that the numbers of infected is still high. So in fact the US still has the highest number of infected per day new cases and UK is pretty high on that list too. So that is one part that the pandemic still is raging in different parts of the world and we recently have for instance cases of new variants emerging and we don't know to what extent the existing vaccines will work or to the extent they will work. I think they will work but with maybe different levels of efficacy given the fact that vaccine versus viruses is going to be an evolutionary war. So that is one part of it and it's also very clear that without vaccines the so-called herd immunity is not going to emerge. So all this Barrington declaration etc. etc. has been going around. People in India saying maybe Delhi has herd immunity. All this is clear now that this is only cyclical up and down of the numbers and if we don't have vaccines the numbers can again search in different parts at different points of time. This is a nature of the epidemic. It's not that this is something unusual. This is what happens in all epidemics and this is because in human terms the human interactions and the virus interactions cannot be defined in this particular way. Oh you know everything is fine because the numbers are coming down. So this is the general picture within which we are talking about the distribution of vaccines. Now as you can see it's very clear that countries have secured vaccines have placed orders on vaccines while other countries have none. This is the general picture and of course the hardest hit are for instance African countries which don't seem to be getting access to vaccines readily. As you can see the Africa is the entire African continent is virtually without at least known deliveries of vaccines. Some vaccines yes but most countries don't seem to be having access to vaccines right now over there. There are of course outliers that India might be otherwise not the richest of countries but India has strong vaccine manufacturing companies so India seems to be slightly better placed in that. We also have Brazil which the president has been strongly against the Chinese vaccines but the point is the only vaccines Brazil seems to be readily getting access to is the Chinese vaccines. So it seems now they have reconciled themselves in spite of their opposition to China and Bolsonaro being firmly with the Trump administration's positions accepting that if they have to vaccinate the people they have to accept Chinese vaccines. So there is a mixed picture on that but it's very clear when you look at the other picture which you have here can you go to the next slide. If we look at this slide which you have this shows very clearly that countries have some have 200 300 percent the number of vaccines they need because they have taken a bet when the vaccines were being developed and some countries have compared to the population have maybe 5 percent 10 percent some none. This is the global scenario that is emerging and we have it has given rise to what has been termed different ways vaccine nationalism. I will go a step further and we'll say vaccine grabbing and in the free for all those of financial muscle are cornering the market in fact having surplus vaccines though they're not able to distribute it they have those vaccines blocked booked but they're not able to distribute at the moment because the delivery systems are still not functioning that's a different story altogether but it's clear that vaccines the vaccine distribution vaccine vaccine access is completely inequitable and under these conditions we're likely to see the continuation of the pandemic. Absolutely right in this context probably of course there's a world health organization which has its own vaccine initiative as well and we see that it has been severely underfunded has not been getting the kind of contributions it deserves and this also takes us to the other question of the WHO itself we know what the Trump administration did they announced a withdrawal. Biden has of course said that they'll come back said that they will the US has joined the COVAX initiative as well but nonetheless we do see that a global initiative which should have helped in delivering vaccines to the poorer people it remains massively underfunded as of now and this also probably has so how what does this reflect on the state of global health administration so to speak. I think there are two issues one is of course a simple question of equity that okay you've got money so you get more of the vaccines we understand that but at least give some money to those countries who otherwise will not have access to the vaccines and that was thought to be solved by the co-vaccine initiative which WHO had supported which also had philanthropic funds coming into it the real cynical part of all this is a small fraction of the money they're spending on their own vaccine procurement a small fraction of that would have really funded the vaccine initiative the WHO has supported. So as of date they need at least 2 billion doses to fund to give vaccines to 1 billion people which will be about 20% of the population of these countries which don't have access or don't have the resources so that also at the moment they really have not been able to do fulfill that target and in fact the way short of the target so that is one part of it that it's completely underfunded but this is only one part of the picture this is another part of the picture which is this is not enough this is just for procuring the doses but you also need to be able to build the cold chain and deliver it to the people and also provide for the jabs you need equipment for doing that all of that requires extra funds and WHO's act accelerator program which it has supported thinks that it needs about 60 to 70 billion dollars equivalent which is about 68 billion dollars is what it has said it requires to be able to do that neither is that forthcoming that that also hasn't happened so even vaccines are available even then delivering it to the people who need it is not good to happen if that happens what it means is pandemic is going to continue in different parts of the world and if pandemic does continue into the in different parts of the world if you cannot control it then what happens to those countries which think they are protected because they vaccinated themselves comes up and here are the two issues which has also been said by various agencies one is a simple public health issue that given the fact that new viruses is emerging continuously if we do not stop it all over the world the pandemic will really not stop it will at best have lower surges lower numbers of infected but will still continue so we need to tackle this as a worldwide problem not as a in each individual country looking after themselves and that's where the word vaccine nationalism really emerged from that vaccine nationalism doesn't solve a global public health problem and secondly what now the IMF to international chamber of commerce have started saying that this is a global problem and if we do not solve it globally then neither will the economies of the world recover pandemic will continue will the global economy will not recover and interestingly what they have also shown because the global economy is interconnected today the rich countries procure materials including finished goods from various other countries but also produce goods which they then sell back to other countries so this whole chain there's a backward forward linkage and if the countries which are suffering from the pandemic still continues to do so then the economic supply chain as well as the selling both these get affected the economies of the advanced countries will not recover either so interestingly what they have now started saying in this enlightened self-interest and very crudely actual self interest of these countries it is necessary that the countries which are rich also provide for vaccination of the countries which are not and instead of grabbing all the vaccine they should try and see there is at least some equitable distribution of the vaccine and their calculations are very simple they have shown through what are called partial equilibrium models I am not going to get into that or you know the input output come equilibrium models what their model shows that if you take the major flows of commodities and if these are affected because of the pandemic then best case scenario the rich countries would still need will lose a significant part of their ability to produce goods both in terms of raw materials and their markets and if you take that into account that's outstrips by far the amount they will have to spend again the calculations are there you can see it what the international chamber of commerce is produced IMF is also indicated that this is interesting because these are by no means the voices of a liberal shall we say public health voice voice is speaking this is not WHO which could be argued has always had a stake in public health or different kinds of left or social democratic or even liberal opinion which has always talked about public health this is the stern face of capitalism which is IMF or it is international chamber of commerce the business of the club of the rich of the rich companies who are saying and it's interesting to see how they are framing it that is in the it's the interest of big capital rich countries to actually support the vaccines and the vaccine initiative in different parts of the world if they don't do that their economic recovery will also not take place so you know if you remember the United States the famous slogan under Ronald Reagan was that public health is equal to socialist medicine and therefore it is to be opposed in favor of private health care and you had at the time the slogan of better dead than red which was their slogan of course it was in respect to nuclear weapons but this is in in some sense now the IMF as well as the international chamber of commerce promoting public health quote unquote socialized medicine or socialist medicine maybe they need to reinvent the slogan is better red than dead absolutely thank you for being so much for talking to us that's all we have time for today keep watching news click