Coronavirus vaccines: How’s my country and the rest of the world doing?

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When it comes to the coronavirus vaccine there is one question most people are asking - when will I get it? A handful of countries have set very specific vaccination targets, but for the rest of the world the picture is less clear.

Getting the world vaccinated against Covid-19 is a matter of life and death, involving complicated scientific processes, multinational corporations, government promises and backroom deals. So figuring out when and how everyone in the world will get the vaccine is not easy.

Agathe Demarais is the director of global forecasting at the Economist Intelligence Unit, which has done some of the most comprehensive research on the topic. She has looked at the world's production capacity, along with the healthcare facilities needed to get vaccines into people's arms, the number of people a country has to contend with, and what they can afford.

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Many of the findings seem to fall along predictable lines of rich v poor. The UK and the US are both well supplied with vaccines right now because they could afford to invest a lot of money into vaccine development and put themselves at the front of the queue.

Rich countries that didn't do that, like Canada or those in the EU bloc, are a little further behind. Canada was criticised at the end of last year for buying up five times the supply it needs to cover its population, but it seems it wasn't positioned for priority delivery.

That's partly because the country decided to invest in vaccines from European factories, afraid that the US under Donald Trump would issue export bans. It turned out to be a bad bet. European factories are struggling with supply and recently it has been the EU, not the US, that has been threatening export bans.

"As long as the European market doesn't have enough vaccines, I think that big imports to Canada are going to remain off the cards," says Ms Demarais. Most low-income countries haven't started vaccinating yet. But some countries in the middle are doing better than expected.