Over the past months, a lot has been said about vaccine nationalism. Much less has been said about vaccine ageism (the decision of some countries to prioritise lower risk groups over those at the oldest ages). And almost nothing has been said about vaccine cakeism.
No combate à COVID-19, distintas mobilizações e movimentos sociais têm sido originados e/ ou fortalecidos em diversas partes do mundo.
The Global Platform focusses specifically on COVID-19 and older people in low and middle-income countries (LMICs). As part of our activity, we have been highly critical about the governments of several LMICs, whose policies sometimes entail implicit or explicit discrimination against their older citizens.
The first wave of COVID-19 hit Nepal back in 2020. As in India and elsewhere in the region, the effects of this first wave were relatively mild. The country is now dealing with a much more severe second wave, driven by the delta variant.
By mid-May 2021, around 40 per cent of people aged 60 or more in India had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccination coverage of the older population could have been much higher if the country had adopted a more age-focussed approach.
In March 2020, the BMJ published a comment on the potential effects that the COVID-19 pandemic might have on older adults in low and middle-income countries (LMICs) [1]. This predicted that older people in LMICs would account for a large share of COVID-19 mortality, since these countries contain around 70 per cent of the global population aged 60 or more and there is less access to effective health interventions than in high-income countries.
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