The radical plan for vaccine equity
By Amy Maxmen,Naature
Charity failed to provide adequate vaccines for the global south. Now, 15 countries are seeing whether an open-science model can end a dangerous legacy of dependency.
An invisible divide formed early last year as COVID-19 vaccines spread through rich countries, while the rest of the world waited. In one part of the globe, newly vaccinated doctors and nurses breathed sighs of relief and grandparents hugged their grandchildren for the first time in months. In the other part, hospitals overflowed with an unmitigated surge of COVID-19.
“We saw our fellow nurses dying with COVID,” says Milly Kumwenda, a nurse at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in the city of Blantyre in southern Malawi, as she recalls a deadly surge of the disease in January 2021. After two cabinet ministers died of COVID-19, Malawi’s president declared a state of national disaster. The aid agency Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, also known as Doctors without Borders) rushed to help and issued an appeal to the rest of the world: “Malawi urgently needs access to
