Ahead of the G7 summit, vaccine nationalism and epidemic inequality are on the agenda

Even now, though, the United States is seen as one of the main holders of vaccine nationalism, stocking up on vaccines so that most of the country will be vaccinated by midsummer, even while other nations are far behind. A new estimate by Campaign One, a global anti-poverty organization, estimates that even after vaccinating 100 percent of its population, the United States could have as many as 453 million overdoses. The world’s richest countries could donate nearly a billion doses of groundbreaking vaccines in the near term without jeopardizing plans to vaccinate their populations, one analysis suggests, and on Wednesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at a Security Council meeting that in 130 countries, no A single dose of the vaccine is delivered. He decried the fact that only 10 countries have distributed about three quarters of the world’s doses so far. “At this critical moment, vaccination equality is the biggest moral test before the global community,” he said. Last month, global public health advocates criticized the Biden administration for not doing enough to prioritize the WHO’s Covax facility, which aims to help poor countries purchase and distribute vaccines for their residents, and not compromise on intellectual property rules that would help other countries to The production of Corona virus vaccines developed by the giant American pharmaceutical companies, and the Biden administration is trying to bypass the fortified nationalism of its predecessor. On Thursday, the White House announced that Biden would pledge $ 2 billion in initial funding to be used through the Covax facility, followed by another $ 2 billion over the next two years after other donors fulfill their commitments. French President Emmanuel Macron said the Times that the United States and Europe should donate about 5 percent of the doses they requested to poor countries. Doing so would help address fundamental global injustices and also drive soft-power victories for Russia and China, the countries whose cheaper vaccines are used across the developing world. “It’s an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it’s politically unsustainable as well as it paves the way for a war of influence over vaccines,” Macron said. “You can see the Chinese strategy, and the Russian strategy as well.” Amid this pandemic, vaccine distribution is not the only reflection of emerging inequality. The economic shocks of a year of living with the virus, as WorldView readers today all realize, are still being measured. The pandemic has accelerated a number of “future of work” trends, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute, as work from home is becoming more common, and commercial travel will likely never return to previous levels, and a range of jobs are graded through automation. Including expanding the use of robots, in China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Spain, Britain and the United States only, McKinsey predicts that 100 million workers will need to find different jobs in the coming years. As my colleague Heather Long mentioned, sectors such as the restaurant, hotel and retail industry may never fully recover, and this contrasts with the flexibility of professional roles in major cities, where countless workers have managed to keep their jobs and keep their productivity out of the office. New research from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finds continued growth in telecommuting jobs in London, Paris, Berlin and Madrid – an outcome whose ultimate effect increases the risks of “exacerbating urban inequality” in these and other major urban areas. Other gaps are widening between transnational societies. The pandemic has led to a deeper decline in global remittances – that is, money that migrants send back to their countries of origin – compared to the 2009 financial crisis. This phenomenon varies from country to country, with countries such as Mexico, India, and China bucking this trend. But, in general, analysts expect potentially dire consequences in the coming months for countries whose economies depend heavily on these cash flows. The continued decline in remittances “exposes these countries to an increased risk of exposure to financial crises that will only prolong their recovery after the epidemic.” The Economic Information Unit warned in a new report. “If an emerging economy is exposed to such a crisis, it may cause financial contagion and destabilize other developing countries.” The ripple effects of the pandemic continue to have a negative impact, with tens of millions of people worldwide in urgent need of humanitarian assistance. Aid agencies are warning of an acute shortage of funding to meet an ever greater need, and in a letter addressed to the leaders of the Group of Seven at the end of last month, many humanitarian organizations, United Nations agencies and anti-poverty activists invited the richest countries of the world. To formulate a “new global agreement to better forecast, prepare and protect the world’s most vulnerable people from the great risks we face.” “These days, if disasters caught us by surprise, it was because we were not looking,” said Mark Lowcock, the United Nations humanitarian affairs official and one of the signatories of the letter, in a statement. “As the world faces the greatest challenge in a single generation, we all need to work smarter, not just harder.”