Covid-19 vaccination programmes in China and India will stretch until late 2022 due to the sheer size of their population, and more than 85 poor countries will not have widespread access to vaccines before 2023, a study shows.

“Most developing countries will not have widespread access to the shots before 2023 at the earliest,” Agathe Demarais, director of the Economist Intelligence Unit, the research division of the Economist Group, said in its study.

The report said vaccine deliveries to poor countries by global vaccine sharing scheme COVAX, backed by the World Health Organisation, may be slow due to delays in delivery to wealthy nations first and poor infrastructure in the developing world.