Vaccinating the World in 2021

As the developed world begins to see the benefits of their vaccination campaigns Mark Green and Tony Blair will discuss what must be done to immediately accelerate production, help plan and support developing countries in getting vaccinated as soon as possible.

Until all countries are safe from the COVID-19 virus no country is safe. This global call to arms aims to set out how the world can strategically vaccinate this year.

Key Takeaways

1. The focus should shift from short-term production of vaccine doses to creating a long-term broader framework coordinating vaccine production and distribution globally.
2. We are not safe until the world is safe.
3. To battle the pandemic, we need to prioritize strategic vaccination, international cooperation, and strengthening countries’ health care systems.

Select Quotes

Tony Blair:

“The doctrine very simply is: find out exactly where the vaccine production is happening, work out how you boost it to the fullest extent you can using existing and some repurposed capacity, get it distributed according to a plan, and vaccinate the strategically vulnerable first.”

“The other thing that we desperately need to do is to help those countries that don’t have the resilience in their health care system to absorb the vaccine to get that resilience.”

“This is probably the biggest challenge of governance that the world has ever known.”

“One of the things that this whole pandemic has highlighted (…) is the importance of institutional capability in government. The thing that makes the difference for countries today is the quality of their government.”

Mark Green:

“It’s key to point out that there is no success, there is no safety, unless everyone succeeds, and everyone is safe.”

“We don’t have to wait around on the supply of vaccines to build the absorptive capacity in the field – we can start this very day and we should work on that right now, because unless we get that, simply producing more vaccines and getting them into the capitals will fall short of where we need to be on this framework.”

“We should be thinking about nimble surveillance, nimble testing capacity, but I would argue more than anything else, health system strengthening.”

“We’re seeing too much talk in the media about any export of vaccines being sort of a humanitarian cause. Now, I happen to believe in the humanitarian motivation of doing so, but this is in our self-interest, because if we fail to elevate global vaccination, unless we get global vaccination to scale, we’re really at risk of everything coming undone.”