COVID-19 vaccine inequality: A global perspective

By the end of 2021, more than 12 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses have been globally distributed and administered [1]. However, nearly one million new daily cases and more than two thousand new daily deaths were reported by July 2022. The best way to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus and the most effective way to prevent severe illness, hospitalizations, and death is to get vaccinated [2]. 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. The WHO aims to achieve global access to the COVID-19 vaccines by mid-2022 with the goal of vaccinating 40% of the population of every country by the end of 2022 [3]. Nevertheless, substantial unequal COVID-19 vaccine distribution was reported a few months after the first public COVID-19 vaccination (March 31, 2021), and the emergence of new SARS-COV-2 variants has highlighted this issue [4]. We used Gini coefficients to measure the degree of COVID-19 vaccine inequality throughout the globe.