A New Alliance for Vaccine Equity Is Encouraging, But Why Aren’t More Funders Stepping Up?

COVID vaccination center in the Limpopo province of South Africa. Mukurukuru Media/shutterstock

It’s a story that dates back to the early days of COVID-19. Rich countries, having gotten a handle on the pandemic, prove to be unable or unwilling to share solutions with their poorer neighbors. That prolongs the pandemic, giving the virus time to mutate and inevitably rebound back on the Global North, travel restrictions be damned.

With the delta variant and now the looming threat of omicron, we’re all suffering the devastating consequences of this pattern. We’ve also seen frustrating reluctance from rich nations and their pharmaceutical firms to make funding, technical know-how, intellectual property and the vaccines themselves available to the rest of the world, even with their own health and economies on the line.

That’s why it’s good to see some philanthropic heavy hitters from the U.S. and abroad team up to call for global vaccine equity in a concerted way. This week, a new “global alliance of foundations” came together to ask the G7 and other wealthy countries to fulfill and extend their commitments to “ensure that countries in the Global South have the means to buy, administer and quickly produce their own vaccines.” 

This new alliance has formed in the wake of the delta variant, which emerged in India and led COVID to spike once again over the summer. And it coincides with the emergence of omicron, first detected in southern Africa and now present stateside.

The alliance includes several major grantmakers based in the U.S., including Open Society Foundations and the Gates, Ford, Rockefeller, Hewlett and Conrad N. Hilton foundations. Abroad, the list includes the Mastercard Foundation, the Aliko Dangote Foundation, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, Fundación Saldarriaga Concha, the Kagiso Trust and others.

Information on the alliance is still sparse—a joint statement on OSF’s website links only to an op-ed authored by Mark Malloch-Brown of OSF, Darren Walker of Ford, and Raj Shah of Rockefeller. There, the foundation presidents lay out an earnest case for much greater attention to vaccine equity and call for action toward two objectives. 

“First, the world must assume collective responsibility to achieve the WHO’s ambitious targets to vaccinate at least 40% of the population in low- and middle-income countries by the end of this year, and 70% by September 2022,” they wrote. And second, “We urge the governments of high-income countries to reallocate at least $100 billion in recycled special drawing rights (SDRs, the IMF’s reserve asset) for low- and middle-income countries in 2021.”

The foundation leaders advocate for the immediate distribution of stockpiled vaccine hoards to low-vaccination countries and long-term attention to pharmaceutical capacity in poorer countries, including to prepare for future pandemics. The op-ed doesn’t mention sharing intellectual property related to vaccine development, but OSF’s joint statement does.

We’ll have to wait and see whether this new alliance’s promise to “support those voices who will hold leaders’ feet to the fire” will actually make a difference. If omicron proves as deadly as delta, the ship may have already sailed for this round. But it’s gratifying to see global health and development powerhouses coordinating more closely on a crucial priority for all of us.

Still, considering all we’ve been through since early 2020, isn’t it a bit disappointing that it’s mainly well-established pre-pandemic global health and development grantmakers on this list? Sure, the presence of funders like Gates and Rockefeller makes sense: Considering their extensive global health funding, their absence would be odd. But it’s been almost two years since the pandemic upended life as we knew it. Where are all the new global health funding powerhouses that one assumes would have taken up this work since then?

To be fair to the philanthrosphere, immediate COVID relief was near-ubiquitous last year. Philanthropy’s pretty good at that sort of thing. But in the field of long-term pandemic management and global health infrastructure, we haven’t seen the influx of major new players that really should have come with such a world-historic event. As we’ve seen, the response from the U.S. super-rich was especially lackluster, particularly against the COVID-era backdrop of skyrocketing billionaire fortunes. 

Maybe it’s because even a sector dedicated to the common good was unprepared for the intersectional, multifaceted problems of a global pandemic—problems that render national borders irrelevant and challenge assumptions about individual and collective responsibility. 

Take Bill Gates, arguably the foremost global health donor of our time. While the Gates Foundation contributed mightily to the global COVID response, through the beginning of this year, both the founder and the foundation resisted the idea that the pharmaceutical industry should relinquish intellectual property rights around vaccine development—and caught flack for it. The Gates Foundation has since shifted its stance, and its participation in this new alliance seems to be a further sign of that evolution (though, again, the intellectual property issue may or may not be a core concern for the alliance).

Even if the world eventually gets COVID under control, the pandemic will have demonstrated yet again that in such an interconnected age, it’s impossible to fund effective solutions by limiting the work to one issue silo, one region, one country, one population. Just as COVID vaccine inequity has highlighted the inadequacy of feudal funding, other key global challenges of our time, most notably climate change, speak to the same dynamic. And underlying it all is an immoral level of wealth inequality and runaway capitalism that philanthropy is very rarely willing to reckon with—even as those problems throw fuel on all the fires funders are trying to put out. 

As that very wealth inequality sets the stage for a new “golden age of philanthropy,” it’ll be crucial to keep pushing for more attention to the structural roots of problems and to the power dynamics that often make Band-Aid solutions more attractive to those who control the cash.