NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The recent development of COVID-19 vaccines, achieved at record speed and financed by massive public funding in the United States, the European Union and Britain, "represents a great triumph of the pandemic," but "this Western success" has created stark inequality in vaccine access, The New York Times reported Monday.

Residents of wealthy and middle-income countries have received about 90 percent of the nearly 400 million vaccines delivered so far, and under current projections, many of the rest will have to wait for years, said the newspaper.

"Growing numbers of health officials and advocacy groups worldwide are calling for Western governments to use aggressive powers -- most of them rarely or never used before -- to force companies to publish vaccine recipes, share their know-how and ramp up manufacturing," said the report. "Public health advocates have pleaded for help, including asking the Biden administration to use its patent to push for broader vaccine access."

However, "governments have resisted. By partnering with drug companies, Western leaders bought their way to the front of the line. But they also ignored years of warnings -- and explicit calls from the World Health Organization -- to include contract language that would have guaranteed doses for poor countries or encouraged companies to share their knowledge and the patents they control," the report wrote.

The prospect of billions of people waiting years to be vaccinated poses a health threat to even the richest countries. For example, in Britain, where the vaccine rollout has been strong, health officials are tracking a virus variant that emerged in South Africa, where vaccine coverage is weak. "That variant may be able to blunt the effect of vaccines, meaning even vaccinated people might get sick," it added.

Western health officials said they never intended to exclude others. But with their own countries facing massive death tolls, the focus was at home. Patent sharing, they said, simply never came up, according to the report.

"It was U.S.-centric. It wasn't anti-global," Moncef Slaoui was quoted as saying. He was the chief scientific adviser for Operation Warp Speed, a Donald Trump administration program that funded the search for vaccines in the United States. "Everybody was in agreement that vaccine doses, once the U.S. is served, will go elsewhere," he added.

U.S. "President (Joe) Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union's executive branch, are reluctant to change course," said the newspaper.

Biden has promised to help an Indian company produce about 1 billion doses by the end of 2022 and his administration has donated doses to Mexico and Canada. But he has made it clear that his focus is at home, it added.

"We're going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first," Biden was quoted as saying recently. "But we're then going to try and help the rest of the world."

As rich countries fight to keep things as they are, others like South Africa and India have taken the battle to the World Trade Organization, seeking a waiver on patent restrictions for COVID-19 vaccines, said the paper.

Russia and China, meanwhile, have promised to fill the void. The Gamaleya Institute in Moscow, for example, has entered into partnerships with producers from Kazakhstan to South Korea, according to data from Airfinity, a science analytics company, and UNICEF. Chinese vaccine makers have reached similar deals in the United Arab Emirates, Brazil and Indonesia, added the U.S. newspaper.