International COVID-19 vaccine inequality amid the pandemic: Perpetuating a global crisis?

By the end of March 2021 -approximately three months after the first public COVID-19 vaccination -more than 600 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been administered 1.Unfortunately, there is a growing global divide in the distribution of these doses.From the beginning of the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) was demanding that vaccine stockpiles be shared equitably and created the COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access (COVAX) initiative to help achieve this goal 2.However, the wealthiest countries are being criticized for hoarding 3, in order to quickly administer the COVID-19 vaccines to their populations.In order to further understanding of this issue, we adapted Lorenz Curves and Gini Coefficients, which is a commonly utilized inequality index to illustrate the scale of the unequal distribution of COVID-19 vaccines throughout the globe 4,5.We build a data set with 178 countries, accounting for approximately 98% of the world population.Data on and COVID-19 vaccination up to March 31, 2021, were obtained from the Our World in Data website 1,and data on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and population for 2019 (the most recent data available) were obtained from the World Bank 6,7.Figure 1 depicts the Lorenz Curve for COVID-19 vaccinations.The Lorenz Curve suggests a severe COVID-19 vaccine distribution inequality.In fact, 80% of the population only had approximately 5% of the total COVID-19 vaccines in the world, and the rest of the population (20%) accounted for around 95% of the COVID-19 vaccines.The Gini Coefficients for COVID-19 vaccines and GDP are 0.88 and 0.86, respectively, and express a severe COVID-19 vaccine and wealth inequality (Gini Coefficient ranges from "0" to "1", in which "0" represents the perfect equal distribution, and "1" represents perfect unequal distribution).