Is There a Cure for Vaccine Nationalism?

The scramble among nations for limited supplies of COVID-19 vaccines has drawn attention to long-standing inequities in public health between the global North and South. The COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access Facility (COVAX) is one of several initiatives to pool resources to acquire vaccines for lower-income countries and coordinate distribution. But months before any vaccine had been approved, high-income countries accounting for only a fraction of the global population had already placed orders for more than half of the projected early supply of vaccine doses. The new mechanisms may not be an instant cure for vaccine nationalism, but they may prove to be an incremental step toward more effective and more equitable collaboration.