/2022

U.S. privately asks Ukraine to show it’s open to negotiate with Russia - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/11/05/ukraine-russia-peace-negotiations/?bezuggrd=NWL

November 5, 2022 by Missy Ryan, John Hudson and Paul Sonne - The encouragement is aimed not at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, but ensuring it maintains a moral high ground in the eyes of its international backers

The Biden administration is privately encouraging Ukraine’s leaders to signal an openness to negotiate with Russia and drop their public refusal to engage in peace talks unless President Vladimir Putin is removed from power, according to people familiar with the discussions.

The request by American officials is not aimed at pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table, these people said. Rather, they called it a calculated attempt to ensure the government in Kyiv maintains the support of other nations facing constituencies wary of fueling a war for many years to come.

The discussions illustrate how complex the Biden administration’s position on Ukraine has become, as U.S. officials publicly vow to support Kyiv with massive sums of aid “for as long as it takes” while hoping for a resolution to the conflict that over the past eight months has taken a punishing toll on the world economy and triggered fears of nuclear war.

While U.S. officials share their Ukrainian counterparts’ assessment that Putin, for now, isn’t serious about negotiations, they acknowledge that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ban on talks with him has generated concern in parts of Europe, Africa and Latin America, where the war’s disruptive effects on the availability and cost of food and fuel are felt most sharply.

“Ukraine fatigue is a real thing for some of our partners,” said one U.S. official who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations between Washington and Kyiv.

Serhiy Nikiforov, a spokesman for Zelensky, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the United States, polls show eroding support among Republicans for continuing to finance Ukraine’s military at current levels, suggesting the White House may face resistance following Tuesday’s midterm elections as it seeks to continue a security assistance program that has delivered Ukraine the largest such annual sum since the end of the Cold War.

On Nov. 3, Defense Secretary Llyod Austin said Ukraine is capable of retaking Kherson, a strategic southern city occupied by Russian forces. (Video: Reuters, Photo: AFP/Getty Images/Reuters)

In a trip to Kyiv on Friday, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the United States supported a just and lasting peace for Ukraine and said U.S. support would continue regardless of domestic politics. “We fully intend to ensure that the resources are there as necessary and that we’ll get votes from both sides of the aisle to make that happen,” he said during a briefing.

Eagerness for a potential resolution to the war has intensified as Ukrainian forces recapture occupied territory, pushing closer to areas prized by Putin. Those begin with Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed in 2014, and include cities along the Azov Sea that now provide him a “land bridge” to the Ukrainian peninsula. Zelensky has vowed to fight for every inch of Ukrainian territory.

Veteran diplomat Alexander Vershbow, who served as U.S. ambassador to Russia and deputy secretary general of NATO, said the United States could not afford to be completely “agnostic” about how and when the war is concluded, given the U.S. interest in ensuring European security and deterring further Kremlin aggression beyond Russia’s borders.

“If the conditions become more propitious for negotiations, I don’t think the administration is going to be passive,” Vershbow said. “But it is ultimately the Ukrainians doing the fighting, so we’ve got to be careful not to second-guess them.”

While Zelensky laid out proposals for a negotiated peace in the weeks following Putin’s Feb. 24 invasion, including Ukrainian neutrality and a return of areas occupied by Russia since that date, Ukrainian officials have hardened their stance in recent months.

In late September, following Putin’s annexation of four additional Ukrainian regions in the east and in the south, Zelensky issued a decree declaring it “impossible” to negotiate with the Russian leader. “We will negotiate with the new president,” he said in a video address.

That shift has been fueled by systematic atrocities in areas under Russian control, including rape and torture, along with regular airstrikes on Kyiv and other cities, and the Kremlin’s annexation decree.

Ukrainians have responded with outrage when foreigners have suggested they yield areas of their country as part of a peace deal, as they did last month when billionaire Elon Musk, who has helped supply Ukraine’s military with satellite communication devices, announced a proposal on Twitter that could allow Russia to cement its control of parts of Ukraine via referendum and give the Kremlin Crimea.

In recent weeks Ukrainian criticism of proposed concessions has grown more pointed, as officials decry “useful idiots” in the West whom they’ve accused of serving Kremlin interests.

“If Russia wins, we will get a period of chaos: flowering of tyranny, wars, genocides, nuclear races,” presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said Friday. “Any ‘concessions’ to Putin today — a deal with the Devil. You won’t like its price.”

Ukrainian officials point out that a 2015 peace deal in the country’s eastern Donbas region — where Moscow backed a separatist campaign — only provided Russia time before Putin launched his full-scale invasion this year. They question why any new peace deal would be different, arguing that the only way Russia will be prevented from returning for further attacks is vanquishing its military on the battlefield.

Russia, facing a poor position on the battlefield, has proposed negotiations but in the past has proved unwilling to accept much other than Ukrainian capitulation.

“Cynically, Russia and its Western supporters are holding out an olive branch. Please do not be fooled: An aggressor cannot be a peacemaker,” Andriy Yermak, head of the Ukrainian presidential administration, wrote in a recent op-ed published by The Washington Post.

Ukrainian officials also question how they can conduct negotiations with Russian leaders who fundamentally believe in Moscow’s right to hegemony over Kyiv.

Putin has continued to undermine the notion of a sovereign and independent Ukraine, including in remarks last month when he once again asserted that Russians and Ukrainians were one people, and argued that Russia could be “the only real and serious guarantor of Ukraine’s statehood, sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

While Western officials also hold profound skepticism of Russia’s aims, they have chafed at Ukraine’s harsh public rebukes as Kyiv remains entirely dependent on Western assistance. Swiping at donors and ruling out talks could hurt Kyiv in the long run, officials say.

The maximalist remarks on both sides have increased global fears of a years-long conflict spanning the life of Russia’s 70-year-old leader, whose grip on power has only tightened in recent years. Already the war has deepened global economic woes, helping to send energy prices soaring for European consumers and causing a surge in commodity prices that worsened hunger in nations including Somalia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

In the United States, rising inflation partially linked to the war has stiffened head winds for President Biden and his party ahead of the Nov. 8 midterms and raised new questions about the future of U.S. security assistance, which has amounted to $18.2 billion since the war began. According to a poll published Nov. 3 by the Wall Street Journal, 48 percent of Republicans said the United States was doing “too much” to support Ukraine, up from 6 percent in March.

Progressives within the Democratic Party are calling for diplomacy to avoid a protracted war, releasing but later retracting a letter calling on Biden to redouble efforts to seek “a realistic framework” for a halt to the fighting.

Speaking in Kyiv, Sullivan said the war could end easily. “Russia chose to start it,” he said. “Russia could choose to end it by ceasing its attack on Ukraine, ceasing its occupation of Ukraine, and that’s precisely what it should do from our perspective.”

The concerns about a longer conflict are particularly salient in nations that were already hesitant to throw their weight behind the U.S.-led coalition in support of Ukraine, either because of ties with Moscow or reluctance to fall in line behind Washington.

South Africa abstained from a recent U.N. vote that condemned Russia’s annexation decrees, saying the world must instead focus on facilitating a cease-fire and political resolution. Brazil’s new president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has said Zelensky is as responsible for the war as Putin.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has tried to maintain good relations with Moscow and Kyiv, offered assistance on peace talks in a call with Zelensky last month. He was spurned by the Ukrainian leader.

Zelensky told him Ukraine would not conduct any negotiations with Putin but said Ukraine was “committed to peaceful settlement through dialogue,” according to a statement released by Zelensky’s office. The statement noted that Russia had deliberately undermined efforts at dialogue.

Despite Ukrainian leaders’ refusal to talk to Putin and their vow to fight to retake all of Ukraine, U.S. officials say they believe that Zelensky would probably endorse negotiations and eventually accept concessions, as he suggested he would early in the war. They believe that Kyiv is attempting to lock in as many military gains as it can before winter sets in, when there might be a window for diplomacy.

Zelensky faces the challenge of appealing both to a domestic constituency that has suffered immensely at the hands of Russian invaders and a foreign audience providing his forces with the weapons they need to fight. To motivate Ukrainians domestically, Zelensky has promoted victory rather than settlement and become a symbol of defiance that has motivated Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.

While members of the Group of Seven industrialized bloc of nations seemingly threw their weight behind a Ukrainian vision of victory last month, endorsing a plan for a “just peace” including potential Russian reparation payments and security guarantees for Ukraine, some of those same countries see a potential turning point if Ukrainian forces approach Crimea.

Reports of a Russian withdrawal from the southern city of Kherson have raised the question of whether Ukrainian forces could eventually march on the strategic peninsula, which U.S. and NATO officials believe Putin views differently than other areas of Ukraine under Russian control, and what a likely all-out fight for Crimea would mean for Kyiv’s backers in the West.

Not only has Crimea been under direct Russian control for longer than areas seized since February, but it has long been the site of a Russian naval base and is home to many retired Russian military personnel.

Illustrating Russia’s elevation of Crimea, the Kremlin responded to an explosion last month on a bridge linking the region to mainland Russia — a symbol of Moscow’s grip of the peninsula — by launching a barrage of missiles on Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, ending a long period of peace in the capital.

In the meantime, Ukrainian leaders continue to telegraph their intention to pursue total victory, not only to their beleaguered citizens but also to Moscow.

Zelensky told an interviewer on Wednesday that the first thing he would do after Ukraine prevails in the war would be to visit a recaptured Crimea. “I really want to see the sea,” he said.

▻https://www.stimson.org/2022/u-s-security-assistance-to-ukraine-breaks-all-precedents

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/31/republican-split-on-ukraine-aid/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_15

▻https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/21/zelenskyy-ukraine-russia-ap-00058201

▻https://www.ft.com/content/7b341e46-d375-4817-be67-802b7fa77ef1

▻https://www.president.gov.ua/documents/6792022-44249

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/03/kherson-kakhovka-water-crimea-battle/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_27

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/20/andriy-yermak-russia-aggressor-not-peacemaker/?itid=lk_inline_manual_37

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/25/ukraine-pessure-liberals-negotiation-putin/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_45

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/10/25/democrats-ukraine-letter/?itid=lk_inline_manual_49

▻https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/brazils-lula-says-zelenskiy-as-responsible-putin-ukraine-war-2022-05-04

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/05/06/zelensky-demands-ukraine-biden-funding/?itid=lk_interstitial_manual_56

▻https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/10/11/g7-statement-on-ukraine-11-october-2022

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/10/09/putin-crimea-bridge-attack-ukraine/?itid=lk_inline_manual_63

▻https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1587820560687501318?s=20&t=Lm2RlYtSmj6a0ewttMg7BQ

#USA #Russie #Ukraine #OTAN #guerre #propagande

Road to war: U.S. struggled to convince allies, and Zelensky, of risk of invasion
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-to-war

Presented with the new intelligence and analysis at the October [2021] briefing, Biden “basically had two reactions,” Sullivan said. First, to try to deter Putin, they “needed to send somebody to Moscow to sit with the Russians at a senior level and tell them: ‘If you do this, these will be the consequences.’ ”

Second, they needed to brief allies on the U.S. intelligence and bring them on board with what the administration believed should be a unified and severe posture of threatened sanctions against Russia, reinforcement and expansion of NATO defenses, and assistance for #Ukraine.

Burns was dispatched to Moscow and Haines to NATO headquarters in Brussels.

In Mariupol, a website for the missing reveals Ukraine war’s toll

A 76-year-old woman, last seen in her basement, is shown smiling in front of a bed of tulips. A missing teenager who may have fled with neighbors is pictured in a dress holding a bouquet. Then there is the elderly couple whose house burned down in the fighting. And a mother-son duo not heard from in a month.

These are just a few of the hundreds of notices users have posted over the past week to a new website aimed at tracking the missing residents of Mariupol, the southern Ukrainian port city Russian forces have besieged for much of the war.

The site, Mariupol Life, was the brainchild of computer programmer and Mariupol native Dmitry Cherepanov, who was forced to flee the city in March after days of shelling cut off the electricity and water supply. Cherepanov, 45, wanted to use his skills to help people find information about their missing loved ones, he said this week via Telegram.

His growing database is easy to use: It includes names, addresses, birth dates and sometimes last-known locations of missing individuals. Users can follow a missing person’s profile for updates or send direct messages or comments to others who have posted. But it also has offered a window into the sheer scale of the human tragedy in Mariupol, where untold numbers of people have been killed or have disappeared.

According to Ukrainian officials, up to 20,000 civilians may have been killed in Mariupol since the start of the invasion — in a city where the prewar population numbered about 450,000. Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed victory over Mariupol this week, despite the presence of a contingent of Ukrainian fighters holed up in a sprawling steelworks at the edge of the city.

Control over Mariupol would give Russia a crucial land bridge between Russian territory and the Crimean Peninsula, which it annexed from Ukraine in 2014.

The city was once a thriving seaside hub and center of iron and steel production. Now it is not clear how many residents have fled or gone missing. In the week since Cherepanov launched Mariupol Life, it has logged more than 12,000 visits and now has more than 1,000 entries for missing people. There are an additional 1,000 posts for those who were evacuated, including some residents who were forced to leave for Russia.

In one post, 62-year-old Marchuk Alexander Yosipovich is shown wearing some type of military uniform. His photograph is accompanied by a brief, painful note:

“I’m looking for my father. Needs humanitarian aid. Food, water.”

Another includes an image of a bespectacled woman sitting on a bench. She is 70 years old and has been missing since March 21.

“I’m looking for mom,” the post says. “She was wearing a light jacket, white hat, moving poorly after a stroke.”

Cherepanov has posted his own entries, including one for a friend who went missing when he left home to fetch water. For him, the mounting losses have become deeply personal. Just hours after he posted this week, Cherepanov received information that his friend had been killed.

“I lost everything that I loved, everything that was dear to me in Mariupol, where I was born and lived for 45 years of my life,” he said.

Cherepanov’s house, the block he lived on, the grand, red-roofed theater where hundreds took shelter and the retro computer museum he built were all destroyed, he said.

But even amid the darkness, Mariupol Life has provided some light.

On a post seeking information about a family who disappeared after their house caught fire, a new comment appeared.

“Get in touch,” the commenter said. “Everyone is alive.”

▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/22/ukraine-mariupol-missing

#missing #Mariupol #Ukraine #guerre #recherche #connexion #mise_en_relation #site_web #plateforme

Why Covax, the best hope for vaccinating the world, was doomed to fall short - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/22/covax-problems-coronavirus-vaccines-next-pandemic

Un très bel exemple de ce qu’est une « fausse bonne idée » : insérer le besoin de communs (modifier les règles de propriété intellectuelle de façon à permettre la fabrication de vaccins partout) dans le cadre des logiques de marché (en l’occurrence des pools d’achat auprès d’entreprises... dont l’intérêt premier n’est pas de vendre en pool, avec un pool financé par des Etats dont l’intérêt premier n’est pas de vacciner le monde, mais chez eux).
A lire et méditer pour contrer toutes celles et ceux qui pensent qu’on peut utiliser les mécanisme de marché pour défendre l’interêt général (par exemple avec les notions de « services écosystémiques » et autres fariboles).

It was, many experts thought, a noble and necessary effort.

The goal: to combat a deadly coronavirus that in early 2020 was already spreading around the world.

The idea: to coax wealthy and poor countries to pool their money to place advance orders for vaccine doses. Participating countries would then share doses equitably to protect their most vulnerable people first.

But just months into the effort, it should have been clear it was doomed to fall short.

The initiative’s backers badly misjudged the desperation and myopia of wealthier countries, which raced to manufacturers to snatch up doses for their own people. Covax — as the program became known — was also too slow to adapt its model even as countries declined to participate and infections and deaths soared, according to more than two dozen international health officials, diplomats and other top experts.

Clemens Auer, an Austrian politician who served as the European Union’s chief vaccine negotiator, put it bluntly: “We told them right away this wouldn’t fly.”

Two years into the pandemic, the world has seen more than 470 million confirmed covid-19 cases and at least 6 million deaths. Many wealthy nations are trying to move on, preoccupied with the Russian invasion of Ukraine or domestic economic problems such as inflation. Efforts to prepare for the next pandemic have faltered.

But just two months after the omicron variant led to an enormous global wave of coronavirus cases, case numbers have again risen sharply in East Asia and Western Europe.

Unlike many national governments, those behind Covax saw the risk presented by the coronavirus early. But the initiative has fallen well short of its aims. More than a third of the world is yet to have a vaccine dose. That has left a huge gap between rich and poor countries. Experts say the lack of vaccinations in poor countries is not only inequitable but also dangerous, exposing the world to a greater likelihood that more-virulent variants will emerge.

And the challenges for Covax continue. Covax has raised $11 billion in total, well short of the $18 billion it initially said it needs. Falling short of funding targets for the spring could cost 1.25 million lives, backers say.

“We are right now basically out of money,” said Seth Berkley, head of the Vaccine Alliance, or Gavi, one of the main organizations behind Covax, during a fundraising call in January.

The takeaway: The world cannot count on mere goodwill and cooperation to propel responsible public health measures in the future.

“They are right to say that the [Covax] model would work — if we were organized differently as a world,” said Andrea Taylor, a researcher at the Duke Global Health Institute. “It clearly didn’t work and doesn’t work in the world in which we do live.”
Coronavirus vaccine doses donated by the United States through Covax, in Honduras in August 2021. (Gustavo Amador/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)
Made in Switzerland

The idea for what would become Covax arose in conversation between two towering figures in global health, over drinks at the Hard Rock Hotel bar in Davos in January 2020.

The encounter between Richard Hatchett, who runs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, and Berkley, the head of Gavi, unfolded at a moment when others were downplaying the risks posed by the coronavirus, which had just begun to draw attention.

Then-President Donald Trump, gathered with other elites in the Swiss town for the World Economic Forum, was telling Americans everything was going to be “just fine.” But Hatchett and Berkley were almost certain that wasn’t true.

The conversation “didn’t seem like just a hypothetical party game,” said Hatchett, who worked on pandemic preparedness in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.

They agreed that the most powerful tool to fight the coronavirus would be vaccination. Their solution, which Hatchett outlined in a white paper published that March: pooled purchases.

By acting together to buy doses, Hatchett wrote, rich and poor countries alike could benefit. Covax could not only ensure that doses were allocated fairly, but also help to give countries more leverage with manufacturers to reduce costs — and circumvent an inefficient system in which drug companies would have to hold complicated negotiations with multiple governments.

The creators of Covax were emphatic that countries should buy doses rather than seek donated ones. They did not want Covax to become a charity, which they saw as an unsustainable model. And they had another, even more radical stipulation: Doses would be doled out evenly, so that participating countries could reach roughly 20 percent immunization around the same time and vaccinate their most vulnerable first.

Without a cooperative model, Hatchett recalls thinking, “rich countries are going to buy up all the vaccines,” as they had during an influenza outbreak in 2010.

Gavi had helped poorer countries negotiate en masse before, for diphtheria vaccine doses and others, with success. But the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t just another outbreak contained to poor or remote areas, but one that hit hard and fast in some of the wealthiest countries. That changed everything.
Workers prepare coronavirus vaccine shipments at a Pfizer manufacturing plant in Portage, Mich., in December 2020. (Morry Gash/AP)
Lack of leadership

In the early months, the alliance came together swiftly with the support of the World Health Organization. But it was missing what had proved instrumental in fighting other global scourges — leadership from a powerful country.

The United States played that role in the effort to control HIV/AIDS in Africa. The George W. Bush administration spearheaded the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which devoted billions of dollars to fight HIV/AIDS on the continent.

The success of PEPFAR “was driven by leadership at the head of state level, which is absolutely essential,” said Mark Dybul, who helped create the initiative.

Hatchett said the idea of an equivalent effort to fight covid met with “no receptivity from the Trump administration,” which eventually pulled funding from the WHO and opposed Covax. No other wealthy country stepped in to fill the void.

Covax’s missteps also hobbled the effort. A report by Doctors Without Borders found that the alliance held key early meetings that excluded officials from the developing world, but included McKinsey & Co., a U.S. consulting firm with close ties to pharmaceutical companies.

Discussions were “heavy on the donors,” said a participant who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the topic freely, referring to wealthy nations and nonprofits such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which funds Gavi and the CEPI. The lack of full engagement with poorer countries became a problem later, as governments struggled with deliveries and complained of poor communication from Covax.

Even governments that supported Covax began to cut deals with manufacturers to amass huge stockpiles for themselves, draining the number of doses available globally. Canada, a vocal backer of Covax, had secured enough doses to cover 300 percent of its population by October 2020.

The European Union ultimately decided to give money to Covax but not to buy doses through it. Auer, the E.U. negotiator, said the proposal to vaccinate roughly 20 percent of each country’s population first and the inability to choose which type of vaccine to receive were nonstarters.

And then there were the financial issues. Gavi, the organization negotiating with vaccine makers for lowest-price guarantees on behalf of Covax, was unable to finalize deals until it secured funding. That meant Covax was at the back of the line for purchases, competing with deep-pursed governments.

Developing counties trying to secure doses on the free market found in some cases that Covax itself was in the way.

“I remember trying to get access to AstraZeneca. I was calling England, trying to get doses,” Ghanaian Vice President Mahamudu Bawumia said in an interview. “And we’re told no, developing countries have to go through this special facility called Covax.”
Killing the messenger

In what would become another, but largely unforeseen, stumble, Covax snubbed messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines, a new technology used by the U.S. drug companies Pfizer and Moderna, because of “limited resources,” according to Hatchett.

In an internal document distributed to member states in November 2020, shared with The Post by a Covax partner, the organization said that mRNA vaccines cost as much as 10 times more per dose than traditional vaccines and warned that they would face additional hurdles for authorization.

Despite their price, mRNA vaccines received emergency-use authorization quickly and have since become the most sought-after thanks to their effectiveness.

“They basically bad-mouthed mRNA and said we shouldn’t even bother,” said one official in a government that backs Covax, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. “That turned out to be a big mistake.”
Health-care workers at Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi prepare for the launch the country’s coronavirus vaccination program in March 2021. (Ben Curtis/AP)

Instead, Covax focused on cheaper — and ultimately less effective or otherwise problematic — vaccines. By the start of 2021, the alliance cut enormous deals with AstraZeneca and Novavax for vaccines made using older technology. The Serum Institute of India, a huge vaccine producer, was set to make 1.1 billion doses.

But Novavax did not receive WHO emergency-use approval until the final days of 2021, while AstraZeneca faced production issues. As India battled a wave of cases amid the rise of the deadly delta variant, the country slammed the door on vaccine exports. Between June and October, Covax was not able to deliver any doses made by Serum.

Those weren’t the only supply issues. Covax signed a deal with the U.S. manufacturer Johnson & Johnson for 200 million doses of the company’s single-shot vaccine in May 2021 that arrived almost six months later, while some wealthy countries received deliveries in the interim. J&J later paused manufacturing of its coronavirus vaccine without telling Covax.

Vaccine makers may have broken “contractual obligations” to Covax, a document released by a WHO committee in December suggested. “We’ve had delays with manufacturers, all of them,” Berkley said in an interview, suggesting they put wealthy countries that could pay top dollar ahead of Covax.

But many governments waiting for doses have blamed Covax, not its suppliers. In August, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi said Covax was “just a scam” that had overpromised and underdelivered. African countries turned to a new procurement plan formed by the African Union, as did countries in Latin America under the Pan American Health Organization.

“Covax has disappointed Africa,” said Winnie Byanyima, executive director of UNAIDS.

In recent months, Covax’s supply issues have begun to improve. But with countries including Israel and Chile already administering fourth doses and as Pfizer and Moderna promise new, variant-specific vaccines, the availability of doses remains a shifting equation.

“Time and time again in this pandemic, people have said that supply constraints are in the rearview window,” said Thomas Bollyky, director of the global health program at the Council on Foreign Relations. “And time and time again, they’ve been wrong.”
Donated, then destroyed

Even as the alliance was watching its original model collapse, in the summer of 2020 it spurned an early offer of extra doses expected to be left over from the European Union’s vaccination drive, said Auer, the E.U. negotiator.

The response, by his telling, was prideful: “We don’t take what you, the rich European Union, is not using.”

Over the next year, Covax had to concede that it would need to begin accepting donations after all — despite legitimate concerns about taking free doses rejected by wealthy countries rather than purchased in partnership. Roughly 60 percent of doses administered by Covax in 2021 were donated. But it was late to the realization that it needed to accept donated doses, experts say.

And while donations have saved Covax from truly disastrous shortfalls in supply, many of the fears about them have come true.

Sultani Matendechero, head of the Kenya National Public Health Institute, said he now receives vaccine doses with “very short expiry dates” donated by wealthy nations. While Kenya is able to use these doses, Matendechero said, others cannot.

Internal documents shared with The Post by a Covax partner show that in October and November 2021, roughly 1 in 5 AstraZeneca doses donated by wealthy nations through Covax ended up being rejected by the receiving government, more than half of the time because they were close to expiration.

In a statement to The Post, UNICEF, which handles logistics for Covax, said that 80 million doses were rejected by countries in December, mostly because of short shelf life and “limited capacity on the ground.” Three million of these doses, almost all donated, had to be destroyed.

Kate O’Brien, the WHO vaccine director, argued that compared with national programs, Covax wastage has been “extremely low.” The monitoring group Airfinity estimated in January that 240 million vaccine doses could expire in wealthy nations alone by mid-March. A UNICEF official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Covax candidly, said some recipients had also become pickier about what they would accept.

Less effective vaccines made with an inactivated version of the virus, such as those available from the Chinese Covax suppliers Sinopharm and Sinovac, are “lower down the pecking order,” they said.

Yap Boum, a regional representative for the medical research body Epicenter in Cameroon, said the donation of doses of vaccines linked to side effects, such as AstraZeneca, had deepened vaccine hesitancy.

“The message being sent is a lack of respect,” Boum said. “I send you what I no longer want and I’m doing it as if I’m protecting you.”
Omicron broke through our vaccines. How can we adapt?
Coronavirus cases spiked globally in the first weeks of 2022, despite record-high vaccination rates. Here’s how the omicron variant took off. (Jackie Lay, John Farrell/The Washington Post)
The next pandemic

Many wealthy countries are lifting coronavirus restrictions, in large part because of the remarkable effectiveness of vaccines in preventing serious illness and death. Across high- and middle-income countries, the speed of the development and rollout of vaccines during the pandemic was unprecedented.

But according to an analysis published last month by the Center for Global Development, the picture was sharply different in the low-income countries that needed Covax the most.

Oxfam in March released an estimate suggesting that the toll of covid has been four times higher in lower-income countries than in rich ones.

And Covax is still scrounging for the money to meet its promises. According to Gavi documents, as of the beginning of March, the initiative had raised only $195 million of the $5.2 billion it asked for in a fundraising round in January. The organization’s backers say that they need the money not because of immediate supply concerns, but to aid with delivery and to establish a “pandemic pool” of 600 million doses for future surges.

Countries have the money, but they also have other priorities. The Biden administration in March asked Congress to authorize $5 billion to bolster global vaccination efforts, half the amount requested in response to the Ukraine crisis.

Despite appeals from the White House, that money was stripped out of the funding package for virus aid after disputes of how to pay for it. Even if it eventually goes through, only some of it will go to Covax.

Even if Covax can get the money, experts and officials have begun to agree that the alliance’s overall approach won’t be enough in the long term.

“This drip, drip, drip of donations through Covax will never solve the problem of the pandemic,” said Byanyima, with UNAIDS. “The pandemic is winning.”

Covax’s emphasis on pooled purchasing came at the expense of a focus on increasing supply, some argue. The organization’s backers have faced criticism for not putting their weight behind intellectual property waivers, which major backers including Bill Gates have dismissed. Many experts say technology sharing could have accelerated efforts to build vaccine manufacturing capacity in the developing world.

Purchasing doses, or distributing donated ones, rather than ramping up production is “like ordering takeout to solve a famine,” said James Krellenstein, co-founder of PrEP4All, an HIV-care nonprofit.

Some governments, including the European Union, South Africa, India and the United States, recently reached a compromise on the proposal, but advocacy groups have largely been disappointed with the result, with Washington-based Knowledge Ecology International calling it a “limited and narrow agreement” that would be welcomed by big drug companies.

Across Latin America and Africa, numerous vaccine-manufacturing efforts are underway, some with the support of a WHO-backed mRNA vaccine technology-transfer hub in South Africa. A big question is whether they can succeed without sustained support from wealthy nations and pharmaceutical companies.

At “some point, donation mechanisms just delay access,” said Colombian Health Minister Fernando Ruiz. His country is shifting to bilateral vaccine agreements and starting projects to develop its own vaccines.

Almost everyone agrees there is one major problem that needs to be fixed: paltry funding.

The WHO is seeking increased, reliable backing from governments. The United States has proposed a different plan: a $10 billion fund for pandemic preparedness, potentially housed at the World Bank — to the outrage of allies who think it would undermine existing structures, including the WHO.

“We discovered the limits of what could be accomplished,” said Orin Levine, director of vaccine delivery at the Gates Foundation, “with the leadership we were in, with the structures that we were in.”
Coronavirus: What you need to read

The latest: A surge in infections in Western Europe, fueled by the subvariant of omicron known as BA.2, has experts and health authorities on alert for another wave of the pandemic in the United States. See the latest coronavirus numbers and how the omicron variant has spread across the world.

At-home tests: Here’s how to use at-home covid tests, where to find them and how they differ from PCR tests.

Mask guidance: The CDC has eased mask recommendations for the vast majority of the country. The change followed a relaxation of restrictions by most Democratic governors responding to nosediving case counts and public pressure.

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By Adam Taylor
Adam Taylor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. Originally from London, he studied at the University of Manchester and Columbia University.
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Iran nuclear talks are halted after new Russian demands related to Ukraine - The Washington Post
▻https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/11/iran-nuclear-talks-suspended

A small number of outstanding differences still to be settled between Iran and the United States may also have contributed to the deadlock, diplomats said. They include how far the United States will go in removing terrorism designations from organizations such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, guarantees regarding the lifting of U.S. sanctions and the details of a prisoner exchange, which could bring freedom for U.S. and other Western detainees held in Iranian jails.

Et voilà... le #mur en #Pologne prend forme...

https://i.imgur.com/H0E4O5F.png

The construction of Poland’s border wall started a week ago.

More and more heavy equipment is now arriving to the border.

The wall will be 5.5m high and 200km long.

As the Polish Army will be working on it around the clock, it will be completed as early as June.

▻https://twitter.com/visegrad24/status/1489523422732374022

#murs #barrières_frontalières #asile #migrations #réfugiés #frontières

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voir aussi :
La #Pologne érigera une clôture en barbelés à sa frontière avec le #Bélarus
►https://seenthis.net/messages/927137