At a time when one unified effort globally should have been made, to both deali with the pandemic and discoverin and making available a vaccine, the lack of a meaningful multilateral spirit has not allowed this unified effort. Instead, rich and advanced countries became a lot more inward looking to managing the issues in their home country than they should have, given the role they could have played under multilateral arrangements like the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) for instance.
At the same time, while low and middle-income countries required more fiscal space to provide the needed welfare and health sector spending during the pandemic, the burgeoning level of debt in these countries, from months of spending during the pandemic, coupled with the already existing high debt repayment demands, have, in turn, not allowed them to provide the needed stimulus response to both deal with the recession at hand, and the overall pandemic-related spending. Unfortunately, here too, a meaningful level of multilateralism has been seen wanting till now, whereby the creditor countries provided a significant debt relief or moratorium response to these debtor countries.
Hence, given a rather poor report card of multilateralism during the pandemic up till now, the world should see an improved multilateral effort… The lead in increasing the multilateral response should be taken from otherwise highly influential countries like the USA, which have been seen to be coming short in this regard in recent years
In addition, both at the stage of coming up with a vaccine, and now making sure that no vaccine inequality is witnessed in terms of rollout to countries, an effective multilateral effort is still missing. Instead, what has come to the fore is firstly, a lack of response under the WHO and WTO, for instance, to make special arrangements to minimize the intellectual property rights or patent walls of big pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic. This could have drastically reduced the high price tags of some significant vaccines in terms of effectiveness rate, in turn reducing costs for developing countries in particular, and could have made it easier to access Covid vaccines by countries overall.
On the contrary, a neoliberal world with profit-mindedness as the prime objective, has unfortunately continued to be available for these big corporations, with no special arrangements made to check this even during the pandemic. Moreover, rich nations sadly have been practicing ‘vaccine nationalism’. Hence, instead of their making plans as a meaningful multilateral effort, that allows an equal distribution of vaccine among countries, one sees that the rich countries overall are mostly concerned about booking as much as possible from the pool of vaccine supply currently available, and being envisaged for 2021, for instance.
In this regard, John Hopkins University’s Anthony D. So and Joshua Woo pointed out in their recently published research article ‘Reserving coronavirus disease 2019 vaccines for global access: cross sectional analysis’ that ‘As of 15 November 2020, several countries have made premarket purchase commitments totalling 7.48 billion doses, or 3.76 billion courses, of covid-19 vaccines from 13 vaccine manufacturers. Just over half (51 percent) of these doses will go to high income countries, which represent 14 percent of the world’s population. The US has reserved 800 million doses but accounts for a fifth of all covid-19 cases globally (11.02 million cases), whereas Japan, Australia, and Canada have collectively reserved more than one billion doses but do not account for even 1 percent of current global covid-19 cases globally (0.45 million cases) … This study provides an overview of how high income countries have secured future supplies of covid-19 vaccines but that access for the rest of the world is uncertain.’
Hence, as reportedly pointed out by Economist Intelligence Unit, developing countries like Pakistan, and mainly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, will be able to widely receive doses of Covid vaccine most late among countries; according to them as far advanced in time as April 2022-23. Moreover, Reuters recently pointed out in their article ‘WHO vaccine scheme risks leaving failure, leaving poor countries with no Covid shots until 2024’ the lack of a meaningful multilateral spirit, as being reportedly seen in the weak vaccine rollout response in WHO’s COVAX programme.
In this regard, they pointed out ‘The global scheme to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries faces a “very high” risk of failure, potentially leaving nations home to billions of people with no access to vaccines until as late as 2024. That is according to internal documents seen by Reuters. The World Health Organization’s COVAX programme is the main global scheme to vaccinate people in poor and middle income countries around the world against the coronavirus. It aims to deliver at least 2 billion vaccine doses by the end of 2021 to cover 20 percent of the most vulnerable people in 91 poor and middle-income countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But in internal documents reviewed by Reuters, the scheme’s promoters say the programme is struggling from a lack of funds, supply risks and complex contractual arrangements which could make it impossible to achieve its goals.’
Hence, given a rather poor report card of multilateralism during the pandemic up till now, the world should see an improved multilateral effort on all these counts, and more. The lead in increasing the multilateral response should be taken from otherwise highly influential countries like the USA, which have been seen to be coming short in this regard in recent years. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, in his recent article ‘How Biden can restore multilateralism unilaterally’ underlined the need for a meaningful role of the USA, especially with regard to much needed greater issuance of SDRs to developing countries during the pandemic.
He pointed out ‘The only way forward is through true multilateralism, in which American exceptionalism is genuinely subordinated to common interests and values, international institutions… Such an approach would not be unprecedented. After World War II, the US found that ceding some influence to international organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund was actually in its own interests. The problem is that the USA didn’t go far enough. While John Maynard Keynes wisely called for the creation of a global currency– an idea later manifested in the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)– the US demanded veto power at the IMF, and didn’t vest the Fund with as much power as it should have… developing and emerging economies lack the resources for the massive stimulus programs that the US and Europe have provided to their economies. What is needed, as IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva has pointed out, is a massive issuance of SDRs. Some $500 billion of this global “money” could be issued overnight if only the US Secretary of the Treasury would approve.’
