On November 22, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced the launch of the WTO-IMF Covid-19 Vaccine Trade Tracker, which is aimed at providing greater transparency on the cross-border flow of Covid-19 vaccines.

The portal features data on the trade and supply of vaccines by product, country and arrangement type, and builds on the work of the WTO secretariat’s information notes on Covid-19 and world trade and the IMF’s 54-page discussion note titled ‘A Proposal to End the Covid-19 Pandemic’.

In its summary, the discussion note states: “Urgent steps are needed to arrest the rising human toll and economic strain from the Covid-19 pandemic that are exacerbating already-diverging recoveries. Pandemic policy is also economic policy, as there is no durable end to the economic crisis without an end to the health crisis. Building on existing initiatives, this paper proposes pragmatic actions at the national and multilateral levels to expeditiously defeat the pandemic. The proposal targets vaccinating at least 40% of the population in all countries by the end of 2021 and at least 60% by the first half of 2022; tracking and insuring against downside risks; and ensuring widespread testing and tracing, maintaining adequate stocks of therapeutics and enforcing public health measures in places where vaccine coverage is low. The benefits of such measures, at about $9-trillion, far outweigh the costs, which are estimated to be about $50-billion, of which $35-billion should be paid by grants from donors and the residual by national governments, potentially with the support of concessional financing from bilateral and multilateral agencies. The grant funding gap identified by the Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator amounts to about $22-billion, which the G20 recognises as important to address. This leaves an estimated $13-billion in additional grant contributions needed to finance our proposal. Importantly, the strategy requires global cooperation to secure upfront financing, upfront vaccine donations, and at-risk investment to insure against downside risks for the world.”

Returning to the tracker – the WTO-IMF portal provides an array of data on total vaccine supply to date, exports by producing economy and supply arrangement type, imports by income group and continent, supply by manufacturing economy and vaccine type, supply to continents and vaccination status.

The vaccine tracker draws from information in the public domain, the Covax Global Vaccine Market Assessment, the United Nations Children’s Fund, the Duke Global Health Innovation Centre, Airfinity, Our World in Data, the World Bank Group, the Asian Development Bank and the African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team.

It is important to note that the data contained in the tracker is preliminary and will be revised in collaboration with countries and areas, suppliers, and immunisation, health and financing partners. Updates will be published monthly to reflect the latest developments.

TheTracker: [www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/covid19_e/vaccine_trade_tracker_e.htm] shows the supply of vaccine doses from facilities where the final vaccines are made to the economies where they are administered; cases where production facilities are located within destination economies are referred to as “domestic supply”. For vaccines that require one dose only, such as the Johnson & Johnson and CanSino vaccines, volumes are doubled to make them comparable with two-shot vaccines.

Essentially, the tracker consists of five categories: Exports, Imports, Total Supply, Supply to Continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania, South America), and Vaccination Status (by income group, or by continent).

The WTO and the IMF reiterate that the data is preliminary and will be subject to revisions in collaboration with economies and areas, suppliers, immunisation, health and financing partners. The WTO-IMF tracker is updated every week to reflect the latest developments.

If the WTO-IMF Tracker is of interest to you, you can approach the WTO or the IMF for additional information at vaccinetradetracker@wto.org or vaccinetracker@imf.org.