Since the start of the pandemic, politics has played too large a role in nations’ response. Politicians boast about the number of vaccine doses they’ve secured, almost as if it’s a competition. This game needs to end and quickly. Vaccines should be donated to the communities that desperately need them.

At the G7 summit in June 2021, the United Kingdom promised to donate 100 million vaccine doses to poorer nations by mid-2022. So far, it has managed a miserly 30 million.

Yet, back at home, its vaccines are finding no takers. Last month, it was reported in the UK that hundreds of thousands of vaccines are to be thrown away because of lack of demand.

In August last year, the UK already threw away more than 600,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine after they were allowed to expire. Oxfam described this as an “absolute scandal”, especially as frontline health workers in developing countries continue to have to work without any protection against the virus.

Meanwhile, in Lithuania, more than 20,000 expired vaccines have been discarded. In Poland, almost 73,000 doses have been disposed. Every time a jab is thrown away, so is an opportunity to save a life.

In the European Union, 70 per cent of adults are fully vaccinated against Covid-19. For low-income countries, however, the figure is about 5.8 per cent. Globally, more than a third of the population has yet to receive their first dose.

This has been common across many other African countries; vaccines often arrive very close to their expiry date or without much warning, giving the recipient country little time to prepare. This means that when the infrastructure isn’t there to implement a vaccine roll-out, doses end up going to waste anyway.

Unsurprisingly, the United States has played a huge part in the hoarding, and then the disposal of, Covid vaccines.

Towards the end of 2021, the international medical aid organisation Doctors Without Borders said that even discounting the third doses or booster shots set aside for vulnerable groups, high-income countries are holding an estimated 870 million excess doses – with nearly 500 million of these in the US alone. It calculated that nearly 1 million lives could be saved around the world, if these doses could be quickly redistributed by mid-2022.

The ludicrous stockpiling of vaccines in the US, UK, EU and Canada is inhumane, illogical and counterproductive. The fact that some countries have enough vaccines for each of their citizens to take seven jabs, whilst vulnerable people in developing countries are still waiting for one, paints a sorry picture of the world.

Not only is there a clear moral argument against this Western selfishness, but it is also impractical and goes against the science. As long as Covid-19 is still spreading somewhere in the world, then it has the chance to mutate. The latest wave of infections caused by Omicron has shown how a new variant can make our vaccines less effective.

Let’s hope Western promises of donations of surplus vaccine doses will be kept. Covid-19 has made clear the globalised nature of the world we live in. The longer the pandemic rumbles on, the more variants we’ll face, and the more lockdowns will ensue. Without a team effort, we cannot expect a team victory.

Adeem Younis is an entrepreneur, philanthropist, and the CEO of the Charity Penny Appeal