But despite great strides in equipping developing countries to maintain the vaccine “cold chain,” nearly 3 billion of the world’s 7.8 billion people live in places with insufficient temperature-controlled storage for an immunization campaign to bring COVID-19 under control.
The result: Poor people around the world are likely to be the last to emerge from the pandemic. The cold chain hurdle is just the latest disparity of the pandemic weighted against the poor, who more often live and work in conditions that allow the virus to spread and whose health systems are not equipped for large-scale testing.