Months before the first Covid-19 Vaccines appeared, the early predictions had been made about how the countries would behave once some, or at least one of the 160 candidate vaccines (in July 2020) would complete the trials successfully. The leaders around the world, such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, have referred to the vaccines as “global public goods”.[1] This implied that the Covid-19 vaccine is a resource that should be made available to all, with the vaccinations in the manufacturing (or wealthy nonmanufacturing) countries not interfering with the vaccine’s use in the low and middle-income nonmanufacturing countries. 

However, this proved to be far from reality. The Vaccine production and distribution, which has turned into what is referred to as the “Vaccine Trade War”, has added to the global political tensions. During a panel discussion in June 2020, Peter Marks, a senior official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration who oversaw the initial phases of the vaccine development for the US, compared the global allocation of vaccines to the oxygen masks dropping inside a plane: “You put on your own first, and then we want to help others as quickly as possible.”[2] In his article, “The Tragedy of Vaccine Nationalism”, Thomas J. Bollyky’s response to that was that the oxygen masks do not fall only in first class, which is precisely the equivalent of the nationalistic approach to the global vaccine distribution. Months before the first Covid-19 vaccines would appear, Bollyky warned that the “my country first” approach to vaccine distribution would not only harm the highly vulnerable populations and healthcare workers in poor and middle-income countries, but will also have far-reaching political, economic, diplomatic, and even humanitarian consequences. 

Countries at the end of the queue, such as Uganda and Pakistan, suffer the most. “They see people at the top of the queue fighting about where they are in the line. It looks like fighting over the cake – when they don’t even have access to the crumbs,” commented Michael Ryan, WHO executive director, on the vaccine row in Europe.[1] The following map from The Economist Intelligence Unit reflects the inequity in vaccine distribution:

Meanwhile, the EU supports tighter rules on vaccine exports since the slow supply of the vaccines due to them ending up elsewhere has been a political problem.[1] The EU wants to halt exports to the countries that are not exporting in return, such as the US and Britain. Two-thirds of the vaccines used in Britain have been produced in the EU – a statistic adding to the Brexit tensions in face of the EU’s rollout pace being far behind Britain. Furthermore, the situation is aggravated by the EU ‘s tensions with America, since the latter does not allow drug firms any exports of the vaccines and has imposed controls on the various ingredients needed to make vaccines as well. 
In early February of 2021, the World Health Organization warned against “Vaccine Nationalism” in face of the new variants of Covid-19. “The world is going to have to collaborate to get out of this”, said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to WHO’s director-general.[2]

Overall, the issue of the global vaccine distribution is a complex one with different players, resembling the game of the prisoner’s dilemma, a popular model in decision analysis where the involved parties prioritize self-interest and reach a less favorable outcome than they would in case of collaboration. Such an analogy is dehumanizing, as the vaccine distribution is not a mere collection of transactions or a means to gaining political and economic advantage. Notwithstanding, what should be kept in mind is that the most favorable outcome in the game can be reached only if all the parties represented cooperate, as evidenced by a model of two counterfactual scenarios from Northeastern University, where 61% of the global deaths could be prevented in case of cooperation (as opposed to 33% in the “uncooperative” case) if the vaccines had been available in March 2020. [3]