According to the Economist, as of the start of June 2021, there have been 7-13 million deaths during the pandemic, mostly in less wealthy countries — and it is getting worse even as we have developed vaccines.
Vaccines are not incredibly expensive: this isn't like AIDS drugs that are beyond the reach of middle-income nations. But if we are to avoid COVID variants and additional needless death, we have to distribute these vaccines fast, much faster than we are now doing.
We could see crises close to home: Central America and the Caribbean need millions more doses. Millions of doses cost millions of dollars: not trillions, not billions. Letting the economies of Central America collapse under a resurgence of Covid, letting new variants evolve could lead to humanitarian crises the likes of which we haven’t seen in half a century.
Covid Vaccine Patents:
It is unfortunately controversial and complicated to get more vaccines rolled out more quickly around the planet. Changing patent laws to allow countries to produce vaccines might speed things up — but there are some voices arguing back that that is not the real bottleneck. Data from the World Health Organization (WHO) indicate that low income countries have only received about 0.2% of vaccines as of April 2021.
At COVID Safer Travel, we think it is simply worthwhile to push our local politicians to know that their constituents want attention to this issue. We want them to seek out and deal with the bottlenecks.
On thing you can do is contact Congress and the president asking that the US should either free up patent rights or subsidize them for poorer countries — it's fine to argue about methods but do something now, get the vaccines into production at full speed now.
Drug companies make plenty of profits to produce these drugs — and taxpayers vastly subsidized the vaccine effort, and it would not harm the world for the wealthy nations — to give this one small thing back.