At the start of June, a clutch of governments and medical charities committed $2 billion to a global procurement fund, with the goal of ensuring access to any potential COVID-19 vaccine for poorer countries, along with another $8.8 billion to support vaccination efforts for other diseases such as measles.

The Trump administration predictably sat this one out. But Donald Trump’s British counterpart, the Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson, hosted the virtual 2020 Global Vaccine Summit where these pledges were made, and stumped up £1.65 billion for the fund. Johnson’s advisers suggest that these contributions could save up to 8 million lives, in what he has dubbed “the greatest shared endeavor of our lifetimes.”

This is not nothing. At the same time, these coronavirus pledges still amount to barely a tenth of what is needed to ensure that the poorest 4 billion people on the planet are immunized when a vaccine does become available. Oxfam has estimated that such an effort would cost $20 billion — the equivalent of what the world’s ten largest pharmaceutical companies make in just four months, or a mere two hours of global economic output.