A Deadly 'Pathology of Power'

This map depicts unequal access to Covid-19 vaccines around the world. Although dose hoarding by wealthy nations has been a major problem, the root cause of the injustice that many have labeled "vaccine apartheid" is knowledge hoarding by pharmaceutical corporations, which has resulted in artificial scarcity.

In addition to documenting the inequitable distribution of vaccines, this map highlights whether governments support or oppose an initiative to suspend certain intellectual property restrictions for the duration of the pandemic to boost the production of jabs, tests, and treatments.

Big Pharma has tried to defend its extremely profitable IP monopolies by claiming that waiving patents won't lead to an increase in the global supply of lifesaving medical tools because generic drug manufacturers in the Global South lack the capacity to replicate the mRNA manufacturing process, but that talking point has been debunked numerous times. New data, represented in this map, show that 120 firms in Africa, Asia, and Latin America stand ready to make billions of doses of Covid-19 vaccines if Pfizer, Moderna, and other pharmaceutical corporations were compelled to share recipes and technology, which wouldn't exist in the first place without billions of dollars in public support, including years of taxpayer-funded research.

How to use this visualization
Hover over the map to see a snapshot of vaccination trends in each country as of December 19, 2021. Click the dropdown menu to discern whether WTO members support or oppose a temporary waiver of the TRIPS Agreement —first proposed by India and South Africa on October 2, 2020, when the pandemic death toll had just surpassed 1 million—and to explore where untapped vaccine production potential exists.

Sources
Vaccination rates came courtesy of Our World in Data - see Mathieu, E., Ritchie, H., Ortiz-Ospina, E. et al. A global database of COVID-19 vaccinations. Nat Hum Behav (2021); Information about whether governments support or oppose the TRIPS waiver proposal supplied by Doctors Without Borders; Data on untapped vaccine production potential compiled by Doctors Without Borders and the AccessIBSA project. National boundaries and country centroids provided by Natural Earth and Gavin Rehkemper, respectively.