They left Cornwall having committed to providing 1 billion vaccine doses to poorer countries in the next year. Among those are the 500 million Pfizer doses U.S. President Joe Biden donated to COVAX, the WHO-backed effort aimed at distributing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries.

You could argue such action (or promise of action) is long overdue: Back in January, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned an inequitable global rollout was likely to become a “catastrophic moral failure” for the globe. Currently, just 0.8% of people living in low-income countries have so far received a vaccine, compared with 20.9% people globally, according to Our World in Data, which sources data from local governments.

There was good news beyond those pledges: The results of Novovax’s late-stage trial results suggests the world will soon have another safe and highly effective COVID vaccine to deploy. 

In total, through June 15, 1.62 billion people around the world had received at least one COVID shot, up from 932.4 million the previous week. That growth was primarily driven by the addition of data from China. The number of vaccine doses administered around the world now stands at 2.5 billion, up from 2.2 billion last week. Among countries with the highest vaccination rates among their total populations are Uruguay (60.7%), Chile (61.4%), the U.K. (61.7%), Israel (63.4%), Canada (65.4), and Kuwait (67.3%).

Thirty-five countries, mostly in Africa and Asia, and including highly populated nations like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (0.04%), Vietnam (1.63%), and Ethiopia (1.65%), have so far vaccinated less than 2% of their citizens. Seventy-five countries have reached less than 10% of their populations.

Everywhere in the world, the situation remains urgent: While new coronavirus cases are trending downward globally, the virus continues to test governments—including those in countries blessed with high vaccination rates. Uruguay and Chile, along with many other South American countries, are among the places with the highest rates of new coronavirus cases. The situation led Carissa Etienne, the director of PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization, to urge G7 leaders to prioritize her region’s most at-risk countries in their vaccine donations.

The U.K., meanwhile, recently postponed its reopening because of the spread of the highly transmissible Delta variant. In the U.S., where the vaccination rate stands at 52.7% and the COVID death toll recently reached 600,000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Tuesday declared Delta to be a “variant of concern.”

Share of the population that has received at least once shot