ABSTRACT
Founded in 2020 at the start of the COVID pandemic, the Geneva-based public–private–philanthropic partnership known as COVAX was supposed “to accelerate the development, production, and equitable access to Covid-19 vaccines” globally. This chapter seeks to describe how the core COVAX facility has contributed to few failures despite securing considerable charitable support from donor governments and individuals, as well as programmatic support from the WHO and other global agencies. It reviews the inequalities in vaccine access themselves, their ties to patent-protected IP monopolies, and the demands they have therefore prompted for a World Trade Organization Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights waiver and other more radical reforms of the current parameters of the global pharmaceutical market. Good reporting on the problems with COVAX has already appeared in leading biomedical journals such as the Lancet, including one widely cited piece quoting global health experts on how the promises of COVAX were thwarted by vaccine hoarding and vaccine nationalism.
