As a pure logistical feat, the rollout of vaccines in some Western nations has been nothing short of remarkable. By most other conceivable metrics, however, the global pandemic response — a response largely formulated and led by those very nations — has been a catastrophic moral failure. As Canada’s vaccine distribution skyrockets, pre-pandemic rhythms resume across swathes of the United States, and the UK prepares to wind down its remaining COVID restrictions, a palpable feeling of normalcy is gradually returning to affluent corners of the world. The major reason, plainly and simply, is that mass vaccinations work: both in terms of minimizing serious illness and limiting the virus’s spread.

Many Westerners are probably at least vaguely aware that the picture looks quite different outside of Europe and North America. Even a cursory scan of the data, however, makes clear just how significant the divide between rich and poor countries really is. Eighty-five percent of all vaccinations so far have been in higher-income nations, with those in the very poorest totaling just 0.3 percent. According to former Ecuadorian health minister Carina Vance Mafla, who cochaired a major recent summit on vaccine internationalism, nearly a hundred countries have yet to see even a single dose distributed. As Varsha Gandikota-Nellutla of the Progressive International noted after the summit’s conclusion, the European Union has already been able to strike a deal for nearly 2 billion booster shots despite the urgent need for first doses elsewhere — above all in Africa, whose more than 1 billion inhabitants have barely received vaccines at all. At current rates, Gandikota-Nellutla told The Intercept, it could take nearly sixty years to achieve global vaccination, a reality she quite rightly ascribes to nationalism, imperialism, and racism.

Recent calculations from the People’s Vaccine Alliance underscore just how slanted the current state of affairs really is: