Forging an agreement to get vaccines fully distributed across the world by the end of 2022 will be a top priority at the forthcoming G7 summit, with the UK prime minister Boris Johnson due to formally set out this target when the heads of state meet in Cornwall.

To meet this target, the G7 countries need to begin distributing surplus vaccines immediately, says Steve Schifferes, honorary research fellow at City, University of London. But with new variants emerging, and with the G7 countries not having reached herd immunity through vaccination at home, such an approach looks politically difficult.

The plan has, though, been bolstered by the US pledging to buy 500 million vaccine doses to give to the rest of the world. However, exactly how many doses Britain will send to other countries, and when, remains unclear. The UK health secretary has suggested that the UK may choose to vaccinate its children against COVID-19 before sending surplus doses elsewhere.

This would be a mistake, argue Dominic Wilkinson, Jonathan Pugh and Julian Savulescu of the University of Oxford. Children are a low-risk population when it comes to COVID-19, so much so that when weighing up the risks of the disease against the risk of the vaccines’ rare side-effects, it’s not wholly clear whether vaccinating kids is actually beneficial.

Yet overseas, there is clear need. Nepal, for example, has seen a surge in cases, has only vaccinated 2.5% of its population, but has had to pause its vaccine programme due to a lack of supplies. Peru has the highest COVID-19 death rate per head of population in the world – and it’s only vaccinated 4% of its people.

All of this points to the fact that the distribution of doses needs to improve. It’s clear that Covax, the programme set up to share vaccine doses around the world, isn’t currently working well to stem the tide of the pandemic. Providing it with more doses to distribute would certainly help – but it could also be adapted to increase its impact, says Monica de Bolle of Johns Hopkins University.

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https://theconversation.com/covid-vaccine-weekly-sharing-doses-tops-the-g7-agenda-161917