Vaccine nationalism means that poor countries will be left behind

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has often been the bearer of bad news during the covid-19 pandemic. It was among the first public-health authorities to warn about the emergence of the coronavirus; it was also early to sound the alarm about the risks of a bungled response. It was thus no surprise when, on January 18th, the agency issued yet another dire forecast. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, declared that the world was “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure” because of the unequal international distribution of covid-19...