Covid-19 Vaccines: unequal access, questioned

Isabelle Defourny, director of operations, MSF
Jean-Hervé Bradol, director of studies, MSF/CRASH

• What are MSF’s priorities with regard to access to COVID-19 vaccines?
Isabelle DEFOURNY: What we are trying to do is to have healthcare and front lines workers in the COVID-19 outbreak vaccinated. Why health workers? The main reason obviously is to prevent them from falling ill or dying. Then, we want to prevent hospitals from becoming hotspots of the epidemic. Vaccinating the staff can contribute to this objective. The third reason to call for the vaccination of health workers is that in the current context, it seems feasible: they are not such a large number of people. For example, in Malawi, we are trying to obtain doses for 20,000 staff, and even with the current tension around vaccines, it seems realistic. What we need to do, is to avoid a huge death toll among health workers before vaccines arrive in these countries in large quantities. Secondly, we want to avoid a situation where some countries use vaccines to achieve objectives such as collective immunity, while in others health workers or people with serious risk factors have not yet been vaccinated.