A year on since the first COVID-19 vaccine rollout began, just one in 15 people in Africa have been fully vaccinated - while Kiwis and those in other wealthy nations, some without major outbreaks, are now getting their third doses.
The first person in the world to get vaccinated outside of a trial was UK grandmother Margaret Keenan, who got her first jab on December 8, 2020. As many Brits have now had a third dose as the number of people in poor countries who've been vaccinated combined, Oxfam Aotearoa said this week.
"We have nurses and doctors in poorer countries across the world caring for people with COVID and they don't even have one dose of the vaccine - that puts their lives and their families at risk" spokesperson Jo Spratt told The AM Show on Tuesday.
"The only way we're going to stop this pandemic is to get the vaccination to everybody as quickly as possible. The longer we leave it… the coronavirus mutates and it can become worse for us and it's just going to keep going around and around the world until we get everybody vaccinated."
Oxfam is part of the People's Vaccine Alliance (PVA), alongside dozens of other international organisations including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and UNAIDS. It warned as early as December last year that rich countries were scooping up all the available vaccines, and despite promises from the international community to ensure vaccines were distributed to poorer nations via the COVAX scheme, that hasn't happened.
"Omicron is with us because we have failed to vaccinate the world," said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS and co-chair of PVA. "Business as usual has led to huge profits for pharmaceutical firms, but many people left unvaccinated meaning that this virus continues to mutate. It is the definition of madness to keep doing the same thing and expect a different outcome. We need to press reset.
"We call on Pfizer, Moderna, BioNTech and others to change course. You have made huge profits in the last year. We now have vaccine billionaires. You don't need to make any more money."
While Omicron's origins are yet to be determined, it was first detected in South Africa, which has a sophisticated virus tracking network set up in response to its AIDS epidemic. It's spreading quickly, leading some to suggest it could be even more infectious than Delta.
COVAX, which has the backing of the World Health Organization and UNICEF, has delivered far fewer than the 2 billion doses it expected to by the end of 2021. It has struggled to get its hands on doses, unable to compete with the purchasing power of rich countries; and in March, India - the world's biggest vaccine manufacturer - stopped exports to focus on vaccinating its own population.
New Zealand has donated hundreds of thousands of vaccine doses via COVAX, but at the same time has contributed to the bottleneck by buying millions more doses than it needs, said Spratt.
"There just isn't enough supply because the pharmaceutical corporations won't share the recipe for how to make the vaccine, so we can't make enough."
Last year, India and South Africa proposed temporarily suspending pharmaceutical companies' intellectual property rights so anyone could manufacture the vaccines. While more than 100 of the World Trade Organization's 164 members back the waiver, under present rules it can't happen until there's a consensus agreement.
The US unexpectedly endorsed a waiver earlier this year, prompting New Zealand to also switch from opposition to support - but the UK, European Union and other wealthy nations remain opposed.
"There just isn't enough supply because the pharmaceutical corporations won't share the recipe for how to make the vaccine, so we can't make enough," said Spratt.
She said most of the research and development that went into the vaccines was funded by taxpayers, so the intellectual property shouldn't remain in the hands of private companies.
"Pharmaceutical corporations were incentivised with billions and billions of dollars of public funding to create the coronavirus vaccine, and also off the back of decades of public funding into pharmaceutical research. So the pharmaceutical corporations don't really own it."
Pfizer and its partner BioNTech have said they should have a vaccine that works better against the Omicron variant within 100 days, but Oxfam says there's no point if people most at risk of catching it - those in sub-Saharan Africa - can't get it.
