Equitable access to vaccines could have prevented half of Covid deaths

A more equitable access to Covid vaccines could have prevented more than 50 per cent of COVID-19 deaths in 20 lower income countries, according to a new study.

Scientists from the Northeastern University, US, have estimated 518,000 deaths could have been averted if the 20 countries in the study had received the vaccines at the same time as the US and other high income countries and in comparable quantities, using a computational epidemic model.

The countries included in the study were Angola, Kenya, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Mozambique, Uganda, Rwanda, Zambia, Egypt, Morocco, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Bolivia, El Salvador, Honduras, Philippines and Kyrgyzstan.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The estimation that "thousands and thousands" of lives were lost to vaccine inequity was a "punch in the stomach," said Alessandro Vespignani, director of Northeastern's Network Science Institute and the study's co-author.

"We need to hav