محمد عبدی سید کلایی

From the beginning of the global COVID-19 vaccination campaign, the World Health Organization (WHO) and the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative strived to guarantee fair and equitable vaccine rollouts worldwide. Nevertheless, substantial unequal COVID-19 vaccine distribution was reported a few months after the first public COVID-19 vaccination, and the emergence of new SARS-COV-2 variants has highlighted this issue. We used Gini Coefficients to measure the degree of COVID-19 vaccine inequality throughout the globe at different levels (global, between, and within Continents) and created a dataset with 222 countries and territories. We obtained COVID-19 vaccination dose data up to December 7, 2021, to analyze the vaccine inequality by June 7, 2021 (six months after the first public COVID-19 vaccination) and December 7, 2021 (one year after the first public COVID-19 vaccination). Our results show that World Gini Coefficients for COVID-19 vaccines were 0.91 and 0.88 on June 7 and December 7, 2021, respectively, denoting severe COVID-19 vaccine inequality. The Gini Coefficients between continents on June 7 and December 7, 2021, were 0.57 and 0.61, respectively, and indicate severe inequality between continents. Also, Africa, with 17.5% of the world's population, administered only 3.1% of the world's supply of vaccines by December 7, 2021. Our analysis suggests that the global vaccine distribution has been severely unequal. This implies that the COVAX initiative efforts have not been sufficient to address the COVID-19 vaccine inequality globally, and renewed coordinated efforts are needed to boost vaccine rollouts in low-and middle-income countries.