Wed 28 July 2021:

The count of COVID-19 vaccine shots administered worldwide topped 3.93 billion as of Tuesday, according to Our World In Data, a tracking website affiliated with Oxford University.

China, where the outbreak originated in late 2019, ranks first globally, with more than 1.57 billion vaccine jabs delivered within the country, according to the available data, followed by India with nearly 441.9 million jabs.

The US has delivered over 342.2 million shots, followed by Brazil with over 134.5 million.

The vaccination campaigns in Germany (89.7 million), the UK (83.8 million) and Japan (79.3 million) also continue apace.

Turkey has so far administered more than 68.59 million vaccine shots, making it ninth worldwide, while over 39.94 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine.

As COVID-19 vaccines are generally given in two separate doses per person, the count of administered vaccines does not mean that the same number of people has been vaccinated.

Vaccine imbalance highlights global inequality

The rapid success of the COVID-19 vaccination programme across much of the developed world is showing us hope that the end of the pandemic may possibly be not that far away

Like in the case of general world economic indicators, the rate of the vaccination programme also reflects the gross inequality prevalent across the globe. According to statistics from Our World in Data, as a whole only 12.81 per cent of the world population have been vaccinated.

Breaking the figures up, while the European Union as a bloc has achieved close to 42 per cent vaccination and the US around 48 per cent, the figures for Africa stands at 1.43 per cent. Asia does slightly better at 9.49 per cent.

The developed countries, through their social security net, can afford to keep those shops and factories locked, doling out allowances to ensure no one goes hungry. Also, with their deep pockets, they have managed to garner vast stocks of vaccines, as a result of which they have been able to inoculate major portions of their populations. This automatically has resulted in lowering infections and the consequent reopening of these countries.

The underdeveloped countries have had no such luxury. Dependent largely on the doles from the developed West and initiatives like COVAX, the pace of vaccination in most of these nations is painfully slow. They neither have the infrastructure nor the resources necessary for this purpose.

They are also in no position to continue lockdowns indefinitely, as government funds are grossly insufficient in most of these countries to allow the people to sit and get a packet of money at home without doing any work.

The already creaking health care facilities are thus getting ever more burdened with rising numbers of cases.

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