Science | March 9, 2021
Last summer, the World Health Organization (WHO) and other groups created the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) Facility to address expected vaccine inequities, in part by soliciting money to buy doses for poorer countries. COVAX has raised $6.3 billion, but to date it has been at the back of the vaccine supply line. “You can’t buy something that’s already legally obliged to be allocated elsewhere,” notes Lawrence Gostin, a global health law specialist at Georgetown University. By the end of May, COVAX plans to ship just 237 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.