HOPE slipped through my letter box in the form of a bright blue envelope on Saturday morning. More precious than winning the lottery, the letter detailed a date, a time, and place where I, by virtue of the country I was born and grew up in, would become one of the 540 million of the world’s 7.8 billion population currently vaccinated against Covid-19.

My gratitude and joy was soured, however, by the knowledge that elderly and vulnerable relatives living in a developing country would not be so lucky and would have to wait.

Indeed, in a recent forecast, at the current rate, some poorer countries would not have widespread coverage even by 2023. As we know, as long as coronavirus can thrive somewhere it will be able to mutate and move around our interconnected world, and vaccine resistant variants will continue to evolve.

This knowledge surely requires a global, collaborative and altruistic approach to vaccinating the world. But the figures speak for themselves – richer countries are going full steam ahead with their vaccination programmes, to the detriment of poorer countries.

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Just last week the World Health Organisation tore a strip off wealthy nations vaccinating younger people with a low risk of developing complications from Covid-19 whilst older more vulnerable people and healthcare workers in poorer countries have had to wait.

WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom said: “The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage, it is also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.”

The issue is that 90% of the vaccines – already in short supply – are being administered in richer countries. They invested in the research and development and got their orders in pretty smartly. The chat amongst us in these richer countries, like the UK, is all about getting our lives back, going to the pub and hugging our loved ones.

But as Norway realised fairly early on, we won't be able to properly get on top of the pandemic until we learn to share. Despite having only around 5% of it’s own population vaccinated, the Norwegian government allowed COVAX, an initiative to vaccinate poorer countries, to redistribute 700,000 out of its 1.9 million vaccine doses to lower income countries.

And COVAX hopes other richer countries will follow suit. Once the over-50s have been vaccinated, should we not think about donating some of our doses to poorer countries? Personally, if I had my first vaccine and delaying my second one for a few weeks could mean that an elderly woman in a Bangladeshi village could be vaccinated, I would absolutely wait. Worldwide, two and a half million people have died during the pandemic and, with a bit of global solidarity we could ensure these figures don’t increase exponentially in lower income countries in the next few months. Longer term, global economic instability as a result of the long tail of Covid will impact on all of us in some form.

The British government is not quite ready to take that leap though. Having put millions into research and development of the vaccines, ordering 400 million doses of which around 100 million could be surplus, and offering funding to the COVAX initiative, it appears to be concentrating on vaccinating younger age groups in the UK before committing to donating any doses to lower and middle income countries.

The problem, however, is that diverting money to the COVAX scheme isn’t showing much of an impact at the moment because those same rich countries have pre-ordered most of the vaccines, leaving little available for the COVAX initiative to purchase.

Some charities have therefore put pressure on the UK government to donate some of these doses to poorer countries through the COVAX initiative now: Vaccinate one of your own, and donate one to the global pot – sounds fair.

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In some of the less developed countries there is a growing sense of unease at the vaccine shortages, leading to some novel potential solutions. India and South Africa are asking for a waiver on medical patents which would mean that they could produce copies of the vaccines – for example the Pfizer vaccine – in their countries.

This could potentially lead to a serious ramping up of the global supply, and, because their costs are lower, the vaccines would be cheaper to produce.

Unsurprisingly, this has gone down like the proverbial lead balloon in richer countries, after fierce objections from the big pharmaceutical companies who, instead of seeing this as an opportunity to take a one-world approach to a once-in-a-century event, see it as the thin end of a profit-reducing wedge.

In the US, President Biden is under pressure to push for a waiver. Those in favour of the waiver argue that the lost profits of the drug companies would be offset by economic gains around the world and crucially by lives saved.

Interestingly it is the embattled Astra Zeneca which is one of two companies that has agreed that their vaccine can be produced under licence in India and South Korea to increase supply. If the waiver of the intellectual property rights proves too problematic for the pharmaceutical companies then this kind of licensing arrangement might be the way to go.

This pandemic has forced us to consider different approaches: When it comes to human lives, leaving the distribution of vaccines to the market is morally wrong; we all need to think more in terms of human solidarity; and we must never forget how interdependent the global community is.

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald.