https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-06-12/weak-g7-effort-on-global-vaccination-risks-catastrophe-new-economy-saturday
As leaders of the world's richest economies gather in the U.K. this weekend, perhaps the best that can be said about their promise to deliver one billion vaccines to poorer countries is that it's a decent start.
But there's a long way to go. A single shot would be a significant advance for Haiti, one of several dozen countries that have so far received no vaccine supplies at all.
And if G-7 heads of government are hoping to embarrass China and Russia with their generosity, and in doing so demonstrate the economic and moral superiority of free-market democracies, they seem to be squandering the opportunity.
This Week in the New Economy
The U.S. is kicking in 500 million doses; the U.K. 100 million. Other G-7 members will make up the difference. "In doing so we will take a massive step towards beating this pandemic," said Boris Johnson, the British Prime Minister.
Really? The global population is approaching eight billion. The World Health Organization has said 11 billion doses are needed to get 70% of the world vaccinated. But Covid-19 is a fast-moving target, and multiple rounds of vaccinations may be required to protect from new variants. Against this need, the G-7 gesture is the "absolute minimum," said Lis Wallace at anti-poverty campaign group ONE.
Setting aside the moral imperative, on purely economic grounds the G-7 should be scrambling to fund the entire vaccination effort in the developing world, and be happy to do so. According to the International Monetary Fund, global economic returns from faster progress to end the pandemic would be $9 trillion, including $4 trillion for advanced economies.
The cost of getting 70% of the world vaccinated? Around $50 billion. As the Economist magazine argues, rich nations "are passing up the deal of the century."
The global economy is at a turning point. More people have died from Covid-19 so far this year than during the whole of last year, with fatalities increasingly concentrated in low-income and emerging economies, now that wealthy countries have launched mass vaccination campaigns. This dramatic switch in the fortunes of rich countries and poor threatens to permanently reverse economic trends that have lifted hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty.
Between 1820 and 1990, the share of world income going to today's wealthy countries soared from 20% to almost 70%. Since then, through a massive transfer of manufacturing and skills to developing countries, that share has plunged to where it was in 1900. This is what the economist Richard Baldwin calls "the great convergence."
But the IMF is now warning of "the great divergence."
In America, it feels like the Roaring 20s is back. Britain's economy has found its mojo again. Meanwhile, the pandemic has deepened the distress of poorer countries already suffering from high levels of debt and the devastating effects of climate change. Most vulnerable are small island states like Haiti and its neighbors in the Caribbean, many of them heavily dependent on tourism.
"This has become the inequality virus," Amina Mohammad, the deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, told The Wall Street Journal. "The diverging world we're hurtling towards is a catastrophe."
A global hunger emergency is looming, too. The UN reports falling incomes and rising prices of food staples like wheat and rice. The cause is supply chain disruptions that could push another 130 million people to the brink of starvation this year. Food riots are rocking Sudan, and in Colombia, protests against inequality, food and fuel shortages have turned deadly, as police attack and kill unarmed civilians.
As always, the burden of suffering is falling disproportionately on children. At least 100 million kids in Latin America are out of school—more than half the total—and many likely won't return.
The U.S. once rallied the world to respond to this kind of challenge. Indeed, before leaving Washington for Europe to attend the G-7, President Joe Biden declared his primary mission was to signal "America is back," leading its allies and "demonstrating the capacity of democracies to both meet the challenges and deter the threats of this new age."
There is no greater threat than the Covid pandemic. It is undoing decades of progress against poverty and robbing an entire generation of children in the developing world of a future. It's no use pretending that one billion vaccines are an adequate response from the world's most prosperous economies, when for just 0.13% of their annual GDP, they could end this pandemic.
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