Commentary: Epidemiology, not geopolitics, should guide COVID-19 vaccine donations --Lancet

With COVID-19 vaccine supplies shifting from scarcity to abundance in high-income settings, such as Canada, the EU, the USA, and the UK, the June 11–13, 2021, Group of Seven (G7) summit in Cornwall, UK, is the time when leaders from those countries should act on their promises to send surplus COVID-19 vaccine supplies to the many other countries where doses remain scarce.

 

Vaccine donations are not the only solution to the gap that has emerged between countries with and without sufficient doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Yet, the potential number of surplus vaccine doses purchased by G7 nations is likely to be in the hundreds of millions or more.

Vaccine manufacturers based in those countries have also offered to sell more than a billion doses at cost for use in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) in 2021, which G7 governments could buy and donate.