As 2022 approaches, with nearly nine billion vaccine doses administered worldwide, public health experts say goals of global vaccine equity have fallen woefully short. Not only has ramped-up vaccine production failed to address shortages in low-income countries, but there remains a long way to go in addressing the myriad challenges related to getting vaccines from tarmacs in low-income countries into residents’ arms.

Meanwhile, the emergence of the Omicron variant, which some widely-used vaccines appear less effective against, could cause even wider upheaval in global supply and delivery.

“By virtually every measure, global vaccine distribution and equity have been an abysmal failure and a deep moral crisis,”  Lawrence Gostin, the director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law, told Al Jazeera. “I think that’s unquestionable.”

“We’re now at a point of having more than a billion doses a month of vaccines being produced, but it’s a slow trickle still to get to low-income countries and lower-middle-income countries,” Dr Krishna Udayakumar, founding director of the Duke Global Health Innovation Center, told Al Jazeera. “So we have not solved the supply challenge by any means…”

 The U.S. Census Bureau estimated more than 21 million Americans didn’t have enough to eat in early December as pandemic relief payments run out and grocery prices rise. Low-income families may soon face more pressure with monthly child tax credit payments ending.

The number of households in which there was sometimes or often not enough to eat reached 9.7% this month, a five-month high, according to data collected between December 1 and 13 by the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. That figure in households with children sunk from 11% to 7.8% in August, after the first child tax credit monthly payments went out.

Grocery prices in the U.S. are up 6.4% from a year earlier.

 Food banks are also seeing a rise in demand, and clinics meant to help malnourished and underfed children have seen an increase in patients.

Hunger in US is on the rise as pandemic relief dries up | Food News | Al Jazeera

 Nurses, care home staff and police officers working on Christmas Day will be thousands of pounds worse off than they were a decade ago as a result of wages failing to keep pace with prices, Trades Union Congress analysis has shown.

Police sergeants and constables have had the biggest reduction, with inflation-adjusted pay £5,595 a year lower than a decade ago. Nurses have had an effective wage cut of £2,715 and local authority care workers a cut of £1,661, the report found. A chef would be earning £1,050 more a year this Christmas had pay kept pace with price rises, while a waiter would be £859 better off, the TUC said.

The coming year is expected to bring a fresh squeeze on living standards. Annual inflation is running at 5.1% and is expected by the Bank of England to peak at about 6% in the spring.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC’s general secretary, said: “Many of the key workers who are bracing themselves for another surge of Covid cases are earning less in real terms than they were a decade ago. That is not right…thousands of key workers will be hard at work on the front line, many of them dealing with staff shortages as a result of the Omicron variant. But their pay awards are falling way short of what they should be, especially in a cost-of-living crisis…”

Essential workers thousand of pounds worse off than a decade ago, TUC says | Pay | The Guardian

 200,000 children are at risk of being left homeless this winter, charity Shelter said.

A poll carried out by YouGov for Shelter found that 104,000 families in privately rented homes received eviction notices in the last month, or were behind on their rent and were in danger of losing their homes. Shelter estimated that 55,000 children, along with their families, have already been evicted in the last three months.

Shelter’s research also showed that 71% of renting families would struggle to find another home this winter, and 21% say their children knew they were struggling to pay the rent. Of those surveyed, 11% said their children worried about becoming homeless.

Shelter’s chief executive, Polly Neate, said: “No child should have to worry about losing their home this Christmas, let alone 200,000. But so many families will spend every day with the threat of eviction looming over them, not knowing if they will still have a home next year.

“Eviction notices have started dropping on doormats and our services are working round the clock to help families who have nowhere else to go.”

200,000 UK children could be made homeless this winter, warns Shelter | Homelessness | The Guardian

 South Korea’s total population of nearly 52 million is set to decline 0.18% by 2021 year-end, for the first time since the country began collecting census data, according to figures released by Statistics Korea.

The country’s fertility rate is the lowest in the world at 0.8 children per woman.

The government institution in charge of statistics and census data also mapped out a worst-case scenario, according to which the present population will drop to around 12 million by 2120 — around 23% of today’s population. 

Moreover, Statistics Korea predicted that the average age of the population is set to rise, from a median of 43 in 2021 to 62 by 2070.

 The combination of an aging population and falling birth rates spells trouble for renewing the workforce, while the country faces a bigger spending burden in the form of tax revenue and health care.

$188 billion, €167 billion has been spent in the decade up until 2020 on financial incentives for couples to have children. But so far, the increased spending has had little effect in boosting birth rates.

Figures released by the Seoul Metropolitan Government on December 16 show that the number of marriages in the city has fallen by 43% in the last 20 years, down from 78,745 in 2000 to 44,746 last year. The average age of first marriages was 33 in 2020, up from 29 two decades ago.

What′s behind South Korea′s population decline? | Asia | An in-depth look at news from across the continent | DW | 21.12.2021

 The United States grew by only 0.1%, with an additional 392,665 added to the U.S. population from July 2020 to July 2021, bringing the nation’s count to 331.8 million people. 

There was a net increase of nearly 245,000 residents from international migration but only about 148,000 from new births outnumbering deaths.

In more than two dozen states, most notably Florida, deaths outnumbered births. Deaths exceeded births in Florida by more than 45,000 people.

“We have an aging population and that means fewer women in child-bearing ages,” William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said. “We see younger people putting off having children and they’re going to have fewer children.”

US population growth at lowest rate in pandemic’s 1st year | AP News

 As 2021 draws to an end let us not forget what the passing year brought.

The combined wealth of the 745 U.S. billionaires surpassed $5 trillion in 2021, up 70 percent since the beginning of the pandemic.

U.S. corporate after-tax profits hit a record high of $2.5 trillion in the third quarter of 2021, further enriching wealthy executives and shareholders. 

Corporations went on a stock buyback spree in 2021, spending a record $234 billion on share repurchases in the third quarter of the year. As analysts have long documented, stock buybacks artificially inflate executives’ stock-based pay and siphon off capital that could be used to raise worker wages 

 As of November 2021, there were 3.5 million fewer people in the U.S. labor force than before the pandemic. The drop has been most dramatic among Black women, a sign of how racial barriers compound pandemic-related health concerns and the shortage of affordable child care services.

 The British government has been accused by NGOs and trade unions of “chasing colonial post-Brexit fantasies” at the expense of the world’s poorest.

They urge Liz Truss to keep aid focused on poverty reduction rather than geopolitical manoeuvring.

The groups criticise the rebranding of the UK’s development investment arm, which will see the Commonwealth Development Corporation (CDC) become British International Investment (BII) next year.

“This new strategy and name change appears to repurpose BII as an institution that focuses solely on private-sector investment and profit-making, rather than development goals and poverty reduction,” write the 12 organisations, including Global Justice Now, the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod) and Unison.

“Rather than investing in general job creation and projects with only the most tenuous relation to poverty reduction, in the hope that the economic benefits will trickle down to the world’s most marginalised communities, UK aid must retain a strong poverty reduction mandate … and support decent job creation to retain its international credibility,” they said.

Increased funding for BII will “almost certainly lead to catastrophic cuts to other, grant-based areas of aid spending”.

“Ultimately, this means that more UK aid will be directed to projects, countries and sectors that provide an economic benefit to the UK, rather than to the world’s most marginalised communities,” they add.

Unison’s international officer, Mark Beacon, said: “Ministers shouldn’t be channelling the diminishing aid budget into the private sector. They must instead fund quality public services to reduce global challenges such as poverty and inequality.”

UK accused of abandoning world’s poor as aid turned into ‘colonial’ investment | Aid | The Guardian

 UK proposals to raise the age of retirement should be put on hold according to a consultancy company.

 The Refugee Council has warned the UK’s failure to create safe routes for vulnerable Afghans is forcing thousands to make the “gut-wrenching” decision to embark on “perilous, life-threatening journeys” to seek safety in Britain.

Four months since the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August, causing mass displacement of hundreds of thousands, the government’s Afghan citizens resettlement scheme was not yet up and running.

The charity said it wanted a rethink on the nationality and borders bill so Afghans and other people seeking asylum were not treated differently based on how they reached the UK.

Under the nationality and borders bill, “anyone reaching the UK from Afghanistan who does not arrive under a resettlement scheme could be prosecuted and sent to prison for having entered the country unlawfully. The government must rethink its proposals and ensure all Afghans can be given protection irrespective of how they arrived in the UK.”

Failure to create safe routes ‘forcing Afghans to make perilous journeys to UK’ | Immigration and asylum | The Guardian