Once there’s a COVID vaccine, who’ll get access?

When a COVID-19 vaccine becomes available, there will be a struggle around the world to get it to the public, an ethicist warns.

With something in the order of 150 COVID-19 vaccine candidates now in different stages of testing and development, a global public health strategy needs to be thinking several steps ahead, beyond the science.

Once a vaccine is proven safe and effective, how will it reach everyone in the world who needs it, and on what kind of timeline?

“A vaccine may play a critical role in getting us back to normal, over time, but it will be a slow and layered process…”

Ruth Faden, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins University, is working to address these high-stakes issues as a member of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Vaccines Working Group, a team of experts from different countries making recommendations on fair and equitable global access to a coronavirus vaccine.

Faden, founder of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, is focused on the ethical questions of vaccine distribution, a particularly delicate and complex angle.

“There are going to be many complicated issues for us to understand and address,” Faden says. “Hopefully this committee, along with other groups, will contribute to solutions for this massive geopolitical challenge: Ensuring that all people, regardless of where in the world they live, will have the benefit of a COVID-19 vaccine.”

Here, Faden shares insights on what we should expect when a COVID-19 vaccine finally does arrive:

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