Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity
The effects of COVID-19 vaccine inequity continue to linger in low- and middle-income countries. There is an urgent need to boost supply and ensure accessibility to counteract the negative results of the inequity. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the WHO, and the University of Oxford created a Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity to combine data on the global roll-out of COVID-19 vaccines with recent socioeconomic information to highlight the importance of accelerating vaccine inequity in order to save lives as well as ensure a faster and fairer COVID-19 recovery for all.
Vaccine equity means that vaccines should be allocated across all countries based on need and not on economic status. But difficult political, economic, diplomatic, and health-related matters make achieving vaccine equity an ongoing challenge. Up-to-date and accurate data can help enhance the international community's understanding of vaccine equity. Three years into the global COVID-19 pandemic, there are still substantial differences in the COVID-19 vaccination coverage of populations in high- versus low-income countries: about 73% of people in high-income countries have been vaccinated with at least one dose of as of February 15th, 2023, while only about 31% of people in low-income countries have achieved the same milestone. This makes people in low-income countries more vulnerable to new variants and slows overall pandemic recovery in the country. Some of the difficulty in vaccinating people in low-income countries is the relative cost burden: high-income countries only have to increase their health spending by 0.8% in order to vaccinate 70% of their populations, as compared to low-income countries who have to increase health spending by almost 57%. In the Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity, you can view vaccination progress and vaccine affordability by country. Additionally, the dashboard offers new insights and recommendations to policymakers to deal with the implications of vaccine inequity for socioeconomic recovery, jobs, and welfare.