After the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the heavy losses suffered across the globe, the rapid development of multiple effective vaccines seemed like a miracle—a way to prevent wide-scale suffering by reducing the spread of the disease, curtailing its severity, and potentially making routine economic activity much safer.
By the start of 2022, however, the picture of global vaccine production and distribution looked different than many had expected. Initially, multilateral coordination by organizations such as the World Health Organization seemed to be a promising opportunity to achieve global vaccine equity. However, this effort fell short in many ways relating to both vaccine production and vaccine distribution. Across many dimensions of vaccine policy—investing in research, supporting production, procuring supplies, regulating safety, and ensuring distribution—economic nationalism played an important role, resulting in a range of varied approaches to a common problem (Fonseca et al. 2022). Vaccine inequity persisted, reproducing and...
