COVAX was created to facilitate equitable access to vaccines. But it hasn’t worked. It was a good baseline model and it was useful because it set targets, argues Monica de Bolle. But, she explains, it had two major flaws. It primarily allocated vaccines in proportion to population sizes, which is not the best public health metric. And it didn’t consider the capacity of countries to roll out massive immunisation campaigns. The answer is for the Group of Twenty countries to come up with a new arrangement.

World leaders will be taking a close look at what progress has been made in tackling HIV and AIDS when they meet under the auspices of the United Nations this week. As Gilles van Cutsem writes, the documents they’ll be reviewing make for uncomfortable reading. Not one of the targets set for managing the pandemic has been achieved. He argues that, to put the HIV response back on track, governments need to commit to four action points: invest more, leave no one behind, bump up treatment and prevention and address the main diseases that kill people with HIV.