Most poor countries will not achieve mass Covid-19 immunisation until at least 2024 and some may never get there, according to a new forecast, which maps a starkly divided world over the next few years in which a handful of developed countries are fully vaccinated while others race to catch up.
Countries such as the UK, US, Israel and those in the EU will probably achieve “widespread vaccination coverage” – meaning priority and vulnerable groups, and almost all of the rest of the population – by late 2021, according to analysis from the Economist Intelligence Unit. They will be followed by a slew of other developed countries by the middle of 2022 and then most middle-income countries by the end of that year.
But 84 countries that make up the world’s poorest will not receive enough doses to sufficiently immunise their populations for at least a further year, a global faultline that will run through the first half of this decade, said Agathe Demarais, the unit’s global forecasting director and author of the report.
“It’s going to define the global economy, the global political landscape, travel, pretty much everything,” she said.
Announcements beginning last December that successive vaccine candidates were safe and highly effective provided a light at the end of the tunnel, but the report released on Wednesday underscored that, in most countries, the end of the outbreak is still a year away, at least.