Nobel Prize economists call for vaccine equity on pandemic anniversary

Nobel Prize-winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence are beginning calls for urgent action to help poorer nations recover from the coronavirus pandemic’s economic ravages, including measures to advance vaccine equity, debt relief, and maintaining fiscal resources for cash-strapped nations.

The plans are described in a new interim report published on Thursday – the one-year anniversary of the coronavirus declared as the global pandemic – by the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s Commission on Global Economic Transformation, co- which Stiglitz and Spence chair.

“Exceptional times call for exceptional measures,” Spence said in the report. “Failing bold action, developing countries would be on a track to lose years or even many years of progress in the post-pandemic world.”

Highlighting the nature of the global economy, the report urges that nations suspend many intellectual property protections for COVID-19 jabs, procedures, tests, and results to stimulate vaccine production and get more people vaccinated sooner in rich nations- and stay forward of changes.

“In the developing world, many of them are not even scheduled to get the vaccines for years to come unless we improve what’s going on,” Stiglitz told reporters during a virtual press conference to launch the report.

But the report mentioned that Big Pharma firms are also benefited from massive government support to research and develop COVID-19 vaccines, and there are some cases that had almost all of their study and development expenses recounted by taxpayer reserves.

“What we’ve seen in the last several months that a very unseemly vaccine grab by rich governments, which have actually booked about 85 percent of global supply for 2021,” Jayati Ghosh, a part of the Council on Global Economic Transformation and a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told reporters as the reporter conference.

“Some countries have engaged different multiples of their identities for the vaccines, in four to 10 times the number that they would need, and this means the developing countries have been not just excluded, but they’re impossible to get vaccines, sometimes, in some cases, until 2023-24,” she added.