China and India are the only two major countries that have been willing to export vaccines while also vaccinating their own people. Meanwhile, to rich countries, the billions of dollars of vaccine market for Big Pharma far outweigh the benefits of saving millions of lives

Private pharma companies and developed nations have created a bottleneck in vaccine distribution through the use of patents and legislation

The COVID-19 pandemic demands that all nations cooperate to vaccinate the entire global population. The usual rules of which countries win and which ones lose do not operate in this civilizational crisis

In Latin American and the Carribean region, so far, nine countries have begun inoculating their populations against COVID-19 and all of them are providing free vaccination to all citizens

Pfizer Inc. is accused of aiming for more profits by not ensuring the delivery of the promised quantity of COVID-19 vaccines after it was found that medics could draw six doses of vaccine per bottle instead of the expected five doses

Bolivia hopes to vaccinate up to 20% of its population in the first quarter of this year. The health ministry has endorsed Russia’s Sputnik V and China’s CoronaVac vaccines against COVID-19

On December 24, the South American nation received the first 300,000 doses out of a total order of over 10 million doses of the Russian Sputnik V vaccine. In the first round it has prioritized the health workers for the administration of the vaccine.

India’s mass vaccination plans may fail if it does not hold open discussions on its plans with health professionals and the people

As trials for vaccine candidates continue, the question of which countries will gain access to it has become pressing. Low-income countries are likely to suffer in this regard

Both Russia’s Sputnik V and the UK’s Pfizer-BioNTech-produced vaccines are reported to be more than 95% effective in their final trials

The new vaccine candidate by Moderna Inc, called mRNA-1273, has reportedly shown 94.5% efficacy against the SARS-CoV-2 in the phase III clinical trials

If we plan to vaccinate the entire Indian people, the states need to be involved in a big way, however, the Modi government has so far centralized all aspects of the management of the epidemic, treating it only as an administrative problem.