In March, as Britain led the world in vaccination rates and almost half its people had received a shot, the organisation meant to ensure fair global access to Covid vaccines allotted the country over half a million doses from its supplies.

By contrast, Botswana, which hadn't even started its vaccination drive, was assigned 20,000 doses from the same batch of millions of Pfizer mRNA vaccines, according to publicly available documents detailing Covax's allocations.

Since January, Covax has largely allocated doses proportionally among its members according to population size, but regardless of their vaccination coverage. This made some rich nations, which already had many vaccines through separate deals with pharmaceutical firms, eligible for Covax doses alongside countries with no vaccines at all.

Six months later, Covax is planning to overhaul the allocation methodology to ensure it takes into account the proportion of a country's population that has been vaccinated, including with shots bought directly from drugmakers, according to an internal Gavi document reviewed by Reuters.

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