Let’s begin with a quick quiz question: What’s the
highest-return investment you can think of? Private equity? A hedge fund?
Here’s something with a far higher return: A global campaign
to vaccinate people in poor countries against the coronavirus.
اضافة اعلان
So far the United States and other Group of 7 “leading”
countries haven’t actually shown leadership in fighting the pandemic globally.
American
vaccine nationalism means that we are hoarding both vaccines and the
raw materials to make them, in ways that lead to unnecessary deaths abroad and
also undermine our own recovery.
“It’s a huge moral failure of the G7,” said Esther Duflo, an
MIT economist and Nobel laureate in economics. “We’re so focused on our own
problems that we can’t see beyond.”
Abhijit Banerjee, her husband and fellow Nobel laureate in
economics at MIT, added that because of the risks of variants emerging from
poor countries, “It’s not only a huge failure, but I think it’s going to come
back to haunt us.”
This is not, of course, primarily about money. It’s about
lives. It’s about the trajectory of humanity. But for those who weigh costs to
orient their moral compass, a new paper from the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) offers numbers that underscore the importance of investing in global
vaccines.
The IMF calculates that an urgent $50 billion investment —
now! — primarily by rich countries to vaccinate people in poor countries would
yield an astonishing $9 trillion in additional economic growth by 2025, by
controlling the pandemic earlier.
That would be a return of about 267 percent per year over
four years, according to experts I spoke to. In contrast, an Oxford University
study found an average return from private equity of just 11 percent per year.
Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, says
this investment in global vaccinations would probably be “the highest return on
public investment in modern history.” The aim is to vaccinate at least 40
percent of the global population by the end of this year and at least 60
percent by the first half of 2022.
Wealthy countries would do so much better economically with
a global vaccination campaign that curbed the pandemic that they would generate
an additional $1 trillion in tax revenue, the IMF calculated. In short, this
vaccine initiative would pay for itself many times over simply in extra tax
revenue.
What’s at stake is the well-being of our species. For
decades, humans enjoyed remarkable progress against extreme poverty,
illiteracy, disease, blindness, and hunger. But because of the coronavirus,
we’ve tumbled backward. When the virus ravages a low-income country, young
girls are pulled out of school and are married off. Vitamin A supplementation
may be skipped, causing micronutrient deficiencies that lead to more blindness
and death. Children aren’t dewormed, so their food nourishes parasites rather
than their bodies and brains, leaving them anemic and malnourished. Women can’t
get contraception or maternal care, so some die in childbirth or suffer
fistulas, internal injuries caused by childbirth.
All this threatens to magnify global inequality.
“A small group of countries that make and buy the majority
of the world’s vaccines control the fate of the rest of the world,” noted Dr
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health
Organization. “The ongoing vaccine crisis is a scandalous inequity that is
perpetuating the pandemic. More than 75 percent of all vaccines have been
administered in just 10 countries.”
Fewer than 1 percent of the population in countries like
Zambia, Sudan, and Tajikistan have received even a single vaccination.
It’s of course understandable that national leaders want to
prioritize their own citizens. But as stockpiles grow, we need to pivot to
fight the coronavirus worldwide — not only because it’s the right thing to do,
but also because it’s in our national interest.
The virus that we ignore in Zambia may incubate a virus that
strikes us. We also have a chance to use this vaccine initiative to rebuild goodwill
and soft power that frayed during the Trump presidency, and some of that may
help us make progress at the next
UN climate change conference in November.
I’m frankly a little skeptical of the IMF numbers, for they
involve difficult guesswork, and vaccination in poor countries is a fraught
process. Covax, the international vaccine effort, works heroically in difficult
places where progress is painstaking. South Sudan, for example, let about
59,000 doses of vaccine expire before they could be used.
But even if the IMF estimates of benefits are off by an
order of magnitude, so that the gain is only $900 billion rather than $9
trillion — that’s still an extraordinary 18-fold return on a $50 billion
investment. The West can’t afford not to make it.
This is a chance for President Joe Biden to step up and
assert United States leadership in the G7 in a way that will benefit the entire
world and also safeguard the American economy.
“We know how to end this pandemic,” said Seth Berkley, the
chief executive of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance. “It would be almost criminal not
to allow us the opportunity to deliver on our mission.”
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