“Covid has triggered the most dramatic setback in a generation of development efforts.” This is the conclusion of Mark Suzman, head of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In its fifth “Goalkeepers Report”, in which the foundation presents the annual interim results on the way to achieving the United Nations’s 18 development goals, the situation is described as “not as bad as expected a year ago”.
In the fight against malaria, for example, there were no more deaths, but the numbers were stabilized at the pre-pandemic level “due to massive health policy interventions” in the countries concerned. The 14 percent decline in important vaccinations for children that was forecast last year did not occur, but was limited to seven percent. Nevertheless, vaccination rates have fallen “unacceptably” to a level last measured in 2005: between the start of the pandemic and the second half of 2020, more than 30 million children missed their vaccination appointments – at least ten million of them due to the pandemic. It is possible that these children will never be able to catch up on their vaccination doses and that they will now bear high health risks.
31 million more people in extreme poverty
The pandemic also had an economic impact: 31 million more people than in 2019 fell back into extreme poverty – that is, they have an income of less than 1.90 US dollars per day. The pandemic and the accompanying economic crisis have set back progress in the fight against poverty by four years, according to the report.
The corona pandemic has worsened the economic situation of women particularly drastically. This year, 13 million women will find fewer jobs than in 2019, according to the report, while men will return to the employment level of 2019 over the course of the year. This disproportion is so serious because the percentage of money that women earn is used far more often for health care and healthy family nutrition.
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“In every corner of the world women have to struggle with structural hurdles,” Foundation co-founder Melinda French Gates is quoted as saying. That makes women more vulnerable to the consequences of the pandemic. “If governments invest in women now and address these inequalities, they can promote a more balanced recovery and arm their economies against coming crises.”
While people in 90 percent of rich countries will return to 2019 statistical income levels next year, says Mark Suzman, only a third of middle- and low-income countries will do so. There is no hope that this could change quickly – also because of the unfair distribution of the corona vaccines: 80 percent of all vaccine doses provided so far, the report found, were administered in rich countries, only one percent went to countries with little pro -Head income. There the vaccination coverage is only two percent.
Malaria incidence stagnates
“This is a drastic inequality, which throws back the economies and society of these countries on many levels, but is also dangerous for the rest of the world because it creates more risks,” says Suzman and means not only that in these, often populous countries the probability of the emergence of new corona variants is high. “On the moral level, the global health level and the level of the global economy, we should, in our own interest, ensure a dramatic acceleration of the even distribution of vaccines this year and the beginning of next year.” The Covax initiative founded for this purpose, to which everyone is now contributing The industrialized countries have so far not fulfilled their task: almost all of the vaccine doses were claimed by the high-income countries.
The example of malaria shows that political action can definitely do good, says Suzman. “We were very concerned that the fight against malaria could be set back particularly strongly by the pandemic.” Because while the advice of a Covid disease is to isolate yourself in the case of a fever and not to leave the house, malaria should be -Patients with signs of fever go to the clinic as soon as possible and receive treatment. But due to “very intelligent interventions by the authorities in the affected countries,” said Suzman, a drastic increase in malaria cases and deaths has apparently been prevented. For example, Benin has set up a digital dispatch system for protective mosquito nets.
It is also true, however, that the corona pandemic in 2020 has not yet had the same impact in typical malaria regions as it has in Southeast Asia, where the crisis primarily affected the spread of tuberculosis. Many patients could not take their medication, many newly infected people could not be diagnosed because they could not or did not want to go to the clinics.
Innovation as a pandemic preparedness
The authors of the Goalkeeper Report therefore consider ingenuity and “breathtaking innovations” – such as the rapid development of vaccines – to be essential not only for the progress of this pandemic, but also for the achievement of global development goals. However, this requires “decades of investment in research and development, global cooperation and commitment”.
In order to make a truly equitable recovery from the pandemic possible, they are therefore calling for “long-term investments in health and the economy”. This is the only way the world will be able to recover from the pandemic and its consequences and to tackle the 18 development goals that it has set for itself again. “If we build on the best of what we’ve seen in the past 18 months, then we can finally leave the pandemic behind and re-accelerate efforts to address fundamental issues like health, hunger and climate change.”
