Covid will meet its match in Rotary: Bruce Aylward

You have a vital role to play in changing the course of this pandemic. You have the knowledge and experience honed from  decades of battling polio. There are many things we still don’t know about Covid but we do know that in Rotary even this virus will have met its match,” said Dr Bruce Aylward, senior advisor to the ­director-general, WHO, addressing attendees during the closing session of the virtual Rotary convention.

He encouraged Rotarians to raise their voice for an equitable distribution of Covid vaccines among nations. “More than a quarter of a century ago you saw a similar inequity and, you challenged the world. You said that no child should be paralysed by polio anywhere. You have worked with us to mobilise communities to vaccinate every child and successfully challenged world leaders to finance the largest internationally coordinated effort in history. Rotarians, history needs you again and the world needs you now.”

Their voice and advocacy were needed on the equitable sharing of Covid vaccines, production know-how, and the full funding of these vaccines, he said. “We need your on-the-ground persons and know-how to help communities prepare for vaccination. We need your stature with national leaders to ensure  people get vaccinated in the right order. And we need your perseverance to see this through. While the rich world is almost awash in Covid 19 vaccines, health workers are falling ill and older people are still dying in the  poorest countries. This is unacceptable and this is our challenge.”

Rotary needed to teach the world what social justice really means and to “challenge the world to ensure that everyone everywhere has access to the vaccines, tests and treatments,” he added.

Although there are new affordable vaccines and tests that can rapidly diagnose Covid anywhere, equitable access to these tools was missing. Covid-19 Vaccines Global Access, abbreviated as COVAX, is a worldwide initiative aimed at equitable access to Covid vaccines. Covax coordinates international resources to enable low-to-middle-income countries get equitable access to Covid tests, therapies, and vaccines. “Two numbers illustrate our challenge — 1.5 billion doses of Covid vaccine have been administered around the world, but only 5 million of those doses — less than half a per cent — have gone to the world’s poorest countries. This is not right and this is not equity. Rotarians can play a crucial role in changing this,” said Aylward.

Dr Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, in his address said that until all people in the world are protected, “not just those who can afford it, the virus will continue to rage”. In an unprecedented show of global solidarity 192 governments and territories representing nine per cent of the global population, had come  together to back the Covax facility. “With 14 vaccines now approved and more than 1.4 billion people vaccinated, the world’s largest and complex vaccine development in history is now well under way.”

By the beginning of next year Covax is aiming to make at least 1.8 billion doses of Covid vaccines available to people living in 92 low-income countries. “When these vaccines first became available we were able to administer the first vaccination in India within just 39 days after the first jab in a high-income country. Since then we have delivered almost 70 million doses to people in 124 countries,” said Dr ­Berkley. But this is not good enough. Inequity still exists. High-income countries have about 30 per cent of their population vaccinated and the lowest income countries, less than one per cent.

He observed that the Covid crisis has disrupted routine vaccination programmes and suspended polio campaigns. At least 80 million children were put at risk of other preventable diseases such as measles, yellow fever or polio because they have missed out on vital vaccination. Several countries were at risk of an outbreak of other vaccine-preventable diseases while battling Covid.

“All this, along with the impact of Covid on the health system, threatens to unravel years of incredible progress and set countries back decades.” It is time to maintain hard-won gains in immunisation to recover from the disruptions caused by Covid. “For polio,  this is a pivotal moment and a chance to synchronise efforts and promote integration of critical immunisation,”
he added.