G20 leaders will meet in Rome at the end of October, in part to discuss how to deal with future pandemics. But the truth is that their countries’ actions have largely fuelled the current one.

Many G20 countries have been Covid-19 super spreaders. Following the coronavirus’s transmission beyond China, which initially sought to quash reporting of the outbreak, the United States and other rich countries chalked up early failures that greatly contributed to the virus’s worldwide spread. Had they acted sooner, they could have at least slowed its transmission to poorer countries. Worse still, their failure to commit to vaccinating the whole world as quickly as possible has created a self-defeating cycle where more transmissible and harmful variants of the virus are likely to be unleashed.