TY - JOUR T1 - COVAX and the many meanings of sharing JF - BMJ Global Health JO - BMJ Global Health DO - 10.1136/bmjgh-2021-007763 VL - 6 IS - 11 SP - e007763 AU - Katerini Tagmatarchi Storeng AU - Felix Stein AU - Antoine de Bengy Puyvallée Y1 - 2021/11/01 UR - http://gh.bmj.com/content/6/11/e007763.abstract N2 - Summary boxThe COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility (COVAX) has been promoted as the ‘only global solution’ to end the accute phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. The notion of ‘sharing’ has been a central trope in policy debate about this ‘vaccine-sharing’ scheme.In the first eighteen months of the pandemic, COVAX has struggled to share the risks and benefits of vaccine development, wealthy countries’ excess vaccine doses, and the burden of financing COVAX and the wider Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), of which it is part.In the global pandemic response, the term ‘sharing’ glosses various kinds of transactions, some of which jar with commonplace understandings of what it means ‘to share’.COVAX’s approach to vaccine sharing obscures what it does not share: decision-making power and the knowledge and technology to produce vaccines everywhere.The notion of ‘sharing’ has been a central trope in the global response to COVID-19. The slogan ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’, which has been repeated ad nauseam during the pandemic, presupposes that COVID-19 is a threat to all of humanity, requiring collective solutions. Nowhere is this more evident than in the global ‘vaccine-sharing’ scheme COVAX (formally known as The COVID-19 Vaccines Global Access Facility), which was established to enable the rapid development and equitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines globally. As Seth Berkley, Chief Executive Officer of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, which co-leads COVAX, argued in the early months of the pandemic: “While there are no guarantees that any Covid-19 vaccine candidates will ultimately succeed […] sharing the risks through the [COVAX] Facility offers our best shot at beating this virus by enabling the world to share the rewards.”1 But what has ‘sharing’ meant in practice during the first eighteen months of the pandemic?In short, as a ‘vaccine-sharing’ scheme, COVAX offered to … ER -