Jumbo jets carrying pallets of coronavirus vaccines touched down last week in Rwanda, Sudan, Kenya, the Gambia, the Philippines and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where pilots posed for happy, masked photographs with health ministers and United Nations officials.

But the occasions for celebration veil a deeper crisis, one that is leaving low- and middle-income countries even further behind than they were before the pandemic hit. As wealthy nations like the United States race toward herd immunity, the pace of vaccine rollout has been painfully slow in Africa and Southeast Asia at a time when both regions are experiencing worrying increases in case numbers.

The inequality wrought by the coronavirus in the United States, where people of color are suffering both the health and economic impacts of the year-old pandemic at greater rates than their white counterparts, is a microcosm of a global phenomenon. As lower income countries struggle to secure vaccines, they will be left behind as other nations reopen their economies, exacerbating an economic gap that is already the widest it has ever been.

Eventually, everywhere else people will be able to travel and move about freely, and Africans won’t be able to,” said Gyude Moore, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development and Liberia’s former minister of public works. “We’re going to see inequality play out again in terms of who has access to the world.”

So far, World Health Organization officials and wealthy nations have pledged more than a billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine to African nations. But only 1.5 percent of those doses have been delivered. The African Export-Import Bank has $2 billion to spend on vaccines, just a fraction of the estimated $10 billion to $12 billion it will cost to vaccinate a sufficient number of Africans to reach immunity on the continent.

At the current pace, Africa would not reach herd immunity until the end of 2023 or even into 2024.  ...

ALSO SEE: If Africa is not vaccinated and remains a source of coronavirus mutations, the whole world will be at risk. --Bloomberg