In March, as the wealthy U.K. led the world in vaccination rates and almost half its people had received a shot, the organization meant to ensure fair global access to COVID-19 vaccines allotted the country over half a million doses from its supplies.

By contrast, Botswana ¡ª which hadn¡¯t even started its vaccination drive ¡ª was assigned 20,000 doses from the same batch of millions of Pfizer mRNA vaccines, according to publicly available documents detailing COVAX¡¯s allocations.

Other poorer nations, with fledgling vaccination drives at best, also received fewer shots than the U.K.. Rwanda and Togo were each allotted about 100,000 doses, and Libya nearly 55,000.