Wealthy countries have reached a deadlock after failing to agree on a new rule at a meeting on Tuesday (December 21), which will allow them to report donated excess COVID-19 vaccine as aid.
Members of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) have been negotiating how to treat and price donated vaccines for aid purposes. The latest proposed tariff on the DAC list is US$6.72 per dose of vaccine, more than twice the US$3 per dose previously proposed.
However, at the meeting on Tuesday, donor countries failed to reach a consensus on the details scheduled for approval, although it is not clear which countries specifically raised objections.
This issue has become highly sensitive after African countries have repeatedly accused Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom of hoarding COVID vaccine supplies for the crime of “vaccine nationalism.”
OECD donor countries, including 19 EU member states, seem to be moving towards another public relations goal after agreeing to count their donated vaccine doses to poorer countries as official development assistance (ODA) starting in 2020.
EURACTIV previously reported that Italy and Belgium are among the countries that are satisfied with the price, while Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland all expressed reservations before the talks. At the same time, the UK said it would not treat donated vaccines as aid.
At the same time, donations to COVAX, the international vaccine coordinator of the European Union as the second largest donor, are also counted as aid.
Due to the financial support of the plan to fight COVID-19, the EU’s development assistance has increased by more than 25% last year. Civil society groups estimate that the classification of vaccine donations as assistance will increase nominally. According to reports, official development assistance of the EU will increase in the future. A reduction of approximately 5 billion euros in two years.
“This deadlock between members is an opportunity to exclude this idea. Nerea Craviotto, senior policy and advocacy officer of the European Debt and Development Network (Eurodad), said that these vaccines were never purchased for development purposes, and Eurodad and Our partners have said for months that they should not be considered such vaccines.
Craviotto added that DAC countries have no rules that “not only cover the quality of vaccines, but also the predictability of these donations, that is, when, how many and which vaccines may arrive.”
“We have not seen any mechanism to ensure that DAC members do not report more than the original cost of the vaccine dose they donated as official development assistance (for example, this is the case with the excess donation of Astrazeneca dose, which costs less than the $6.72 price tag), “She added.
Despite the pledge to donate 1.8 billion vaccines, the number of vaccines delivered was less than 20%. At the same time, more than two-thirds of the donations are vaccines with a shelf life of less than three months. This has increased the pressure on the domestic vaccination campaign and made it more likely that many vaccines will not be used before the expiration date.
[Edited by Zoran Radosavljevic]
