Inequity in Access to Covid 19 Vaccines in Poor Countries: A Critical Examination of the Covax Strategy

Abstract

Inequity in access to vaccines for epidemic diseases is a challenging issue in global health that has been further aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic. There are enormous disparities in vaccine rates between low, middle, and high-income countries and in late September 2021, only fifteen out of 54 countries in Africa had reached WHO’s goal to have fully vaccinated 10% of their populations. To increase equitable vaccine access for all, Vaccine Alliance (Gavi), Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness
Innovations (CEPI), and World Health Organization (WHO) created the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) platform focused on accelerating the development, manufacture, and distribution of Covid-19 vaccines. The COVAX platform have had troubles delivering on set goals and African leaders are now critical towards world leaders and COVAX for not materializing up to their promises. COVAX’s failure to deliver
actualizes the question of whether their strategy for vaccine equity is enough for addressing the issue. The paper employs Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and Li’s concept of rendering technical to critically examine dominant ideas in the COVAX platform’s strategy and representation, and how this affects framings of solutions. The paper finds that COVAX’s strategy for increasing vaccine equity for all fails to address power play and structures in manufacturing, distribution, and access to vaccines, and therefore fails to effectively address the issue of inequitable Covid-19 vaccine access.