The good news: The U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe are all gearing up to dole out new COVID-19 vaccines this fall to tackle the ever-evolving coronavirus. The bad news: supply and distribution issues will continue to plague continents like Africa and poorer countries in the global south.

These countries and regions, as the pandemic approaches the three-year mark, remain under-resourced with fewer vaccine manufacturers, less funding and weaker distribution channels.

And the pattern is being repeated with the monkeypox outbreak. For example, countries on the African continent have reported deaths, but have no access to vaccines. The U.S., where vaccines are being distributed, has no reported deaths to date.

“Nothing has fundamentally changed from 2020 to now,” Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the Access IBSA project, which advocates for equitable medicine access in India, Brazil and South Africa, said in an interview with Yahoo Finance.

“So when we get the reformulated [COVID] vaccines out late this fall, we will follow exactly the same pattern as the mRNA vaccines have followed to-date,” he added.

The situation has improved somewhat, with supply no longer the hurdle. But distribution and labor issues remain.

The bottom line is this: Without addressing supply and distribution equity issues—and if vaccination rates continue to be low— the odds of stopping the pandemic anytime soon are slim.

“If low income countries could have vaccinated on the same timeline as high income countries, we probably wouldn't have prevented Delta, but there's a very good chance we would have prevented Omicron, and all the subsequent (subvariants) to Omicron,” said USAID COVID-19 Task Force executive director Jeremy Konyndyk at a recent conference hosted by The UPS Foundation, UPS (UPS) Impact Summit.

In other words, Africa’s problem is everyone’s problem, as Ted Chaiban, Global Lead Coordinator for COVID-19 Vaccine Country-Readiness and Delivery at UNICEF, told Yahoo Finance.