With COVID death rates soaring in parts of Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Eastern Europe, the G20’s half-hearted humanitarianism is plainly a moral failure. But it is also a betrayal of the rich world’s own enlightened self-interest. The same IMF report that put the price of a comprehensive global vaccination drive at $50 billion also estimated that such a drive would yield $9 trillion worth of benefits by 2025, with “over 40 percent of this gain going to advanced economies as stronger recoveries in the rest of the world raises demand for their goods, and through stronger confidence effects at home as the pandemic ends durably.” The report goes on to note that this gain would translate into an extra $1 trillion in tax revenue for advanced economies, “which means that funding this proposal may possibly be the highest-return public investment ever.”

The G20 didn’t take the IMF up on that offer. Now we’re living in the counterfactual.

COVID’s rampant spread in under-vaccinated, low and middle-income countries is giving the virus ample opportunity to produce more menacing variants (as it did with Delta in India in late 2020). At the same time, dire public health conditions in the developing world are taking a toll on economic conditions in the wealthy one. As Bloomberg reported this week, Delta’s resurgence is depressing global growth, while pandemic-induced factory closures in Southeast Asia are further disrupting global supply chains. Together, these developments could revive “stagflation”: the simultaneous occurrence of weak demand (as public health problems limit hiring and investment) and high prices (as production delays yield a scarcity of critical inputs for popular goods).