Sensemaker: No one’s safe until everyone is safe

• US stocks surged to an all-time high after Trump allowed a transition to begin.
• Rishi Sunak earmarked £4.3 billion to help the UK’s long-term unemployed (more below).
• Armenia accused Azerbaijan of using banned cluster bombs and white phosphorus in Nagorno-Karabakh.
• Wildlife rangers found a mysterious metal monolith in the Utah desert that reminded them of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The world is much closer to the mass roll-out of Covid vaccines than it could have expected at the start of the pandemic, but unequal access will keep the virus raging and poorer countries suffering. “It’s going to create the most terrible schism in society,” WHO special envoy David Nabarro told an OECD briefing yesterday. 

There is an alternative:

• The 30-60 choice. Two billion vaccine doses distributed to 50 rich countries would reduce global deaths by a little over 30 per cent, according to Seth Berkley, CEO of Gavi, which funds vaccines for low-income countries. But if distributed to all countries in proportion to population, those same two billion doses would reduce deaths by more than 60 per cent. You can’t end the acute phase of the pandemic anywhere unless you protect people everywhere.
• The plan. For a genuinely global solution all eyes are on Covax, which aims to distribute two billion doses to 92 low- and middle-income countries by the end of 2021. It’s supported by more than 75 wealthier countries, including the UK and China but not the US. And it has been boosted by the success of the phase 3 trials for the AstraZeneca jab, which Oxford scientists this week called “a vaccine for all the world”. The vaccine is available at cost indefinitely to low- and middle-income countries and Covax has access to half the doses produced. 
• But the picture remains unequal. By August, the EU, the UK and the US had already pre-ordered enough doses of vaccine candidates in phase 3 trials to vaccinate their population several times over. (There are bilateral benefits from the US, for example, spending $10 billion on Operation Warp Speed.) Meanwhile Covax, which represents almost half of the world population, has been able to pre-order just 500 million doses (200 million of which are still in the early stages of clinical testing), or fewer than one for every seven people it seeks to help.
• For want of a few billion. Covax faces a $4.5 billion funding shortfall, which WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week begged the G20 to plug. “It is like we have created a big feast, and low- and middle-income countries are sitting at the kids’ table,” said Joanne Liu, former international president of Médecins Sans Frontières.

Meanwhile the pandemic continues. Nabarro warned that the constant yo-yoing between restriction and movement – next up, the Christmas release – means western Europe will face a third wave of the coronavirus by February. “The only way you deal with it is by containment, containment, containment. Early, rapid, robust, rigorous.” 

Countries like South Korea and Vietnam have shown that this works, but what does it look like somewhere like the UK? “Well-integrated local-level data-supported capacity to empower and trust people to do the right stuff,” said Nabarro. “Stop all this central government posturing and make Covid more of a local issue.” 

Someone tell that to Messrs Johnson and Hancock.

Rishi’s rescue
Jobs for some. Help for others. That’s the headline before the UK chancellor’s spending review today. There may be the odd surprise at the dispatch box but it’s clear that while Sunak would love to avoid a surge in long-term unemployment he doesn’t want big Keynesian job creation schemes or anything that looks like a universal basic income. Job seekers will get guidance, interview coaching and maybe some re-training instead.

The numbers: the £4.3 billion Sunak has earmarked is split between £2.9 billion for a new Restart programme and £1.4 to expand capacity of the existing Jobcentre Plus network. There will be 250,000 state-subsidised jobs for younger people, and an extension till March of the £2,000 payment to employers for each apprentice they take on. But the outlook for most of the million or so people expected to be made redundant by this time next year will depend overwhelmingly on their local job market.

In the optimistic column, the Office for Budget Responsibility’s updated GDP forecasts point to a V-shaped recovery next year with the fastest growth since 1941.

In the miserable column: that will follow the deepest recession in three centuries. And the end of the Brexit transition. The OBR, the governor of the Bank of England and the Resolution Foundation all agree a no-deal Brexit would deliver a long-term hit to the UK economy even more profound than Covid.

Poor Charli D’Amelio
Charli D’Amelio is a 16 year-old from Norwalk, Connecticut who enjoys using her smartphone to film herself dancing. Last week she lost a million Instagram followers for bad manners in a YouTube video in which, for a new series, she was filmed dining with her family and a friend. She has since apologised but after receiving death threats as part of the backlash she also implored her followers to “just be nice”. This is no small ask, because on TikTok she has since reached 100 million of them. We’ve followed the story of TikTok’s run-in with the Trump administration quite closely. The theory is that TikTok could pose a security risk to the West because it’s Chinese owned. 16 year-old D’Amelio (net worth about $4 million) is the reality. Theory and reality are not mutually exclusive, but in some respects they seem quite far apart.