People from poorer countries are unlikely to be able to get a COVID-19 vaccine this year because the richest countries in the world have bought one billion more doses than their citizens need, a new study has found, as G7 leaders indicated have that they are willing to share their excess doses. before a meeting Friday.
“This vast excess of vaccine is the personification of vaccine nationalism, with countries prioritizing their own vaccination needs at the expense of other countries and the global recovery,” said ONE, a group fighting poverty.
ONE’s policy team added that a massive course correction in the distribution was needed if the world wanted to protect and save lives as the death toll from the pandemic approached 2.5 million.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday that only ten countries had so far administered 75 per cent of all vaccinations, describing it as ‘wildly unfair and unfair’.
Guterres said at least 130 countries have not yet received a single dose of COVID-19 vaccine.
“At this critical moment, vaccine inequality is the biggest moral test before the world community,” he said, adding that a meeting of the G7 summit’s industrialized countries “on Friday could” create the momentum “to address inequality.
‘Unprecedented inequality’
There are indications that the G7 is listening with the leaders of France, the United Kingdom and the United States, all of whom indicate that they will make concessions to vaccines during the virtual meeting hosted by the United Kingdom.
French President Emmanuel Macron has called on Europe and the United States to link between 3 and 5 percent of their vaccine supply to developing countries.
“This is an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and it is also politically unsustainable because it paves the way for a war of influence over vaccines,” Macron said in a video link to the Financial Times newspaper on Thursday.
Macron said German Chancellor Angela Merkel had also agreed that the decision to share part of Europe’s vaccine stockpile should be a joint effort.
According to an analysis, the excess dose of COVID-19 applied by rich countries alone is sufficient to vaccinate the entire adult population of Africa. [Juan Mabromata/AFP]
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said he is also prepared to give away hundreds of millions of extra doses of vaccine to the developing world once all adults in the UK have been vaccinated.
A report in the British newspaper Times said that up to 80 per cent of the excess doses go to the global vaccine alliance, COVAX, which is set up to distribute COVID-19 medicines to lower-income countries.
The process is expected to begin early on March 1.
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden is expected to pledge $ 4 billion to the COVAX program.
According to the World Health Organization, the facility needs $ 5 billion this year alone to spread vaccinations to at least the most vulnerable 20 percent of the population in poor countries.
The Biden administration has not announced whether it is willing to share its COVID-19 vaccine supply. Currently, the US has selected 600 million doses from the drug manufacturers, enough to cover its entire population under the two-stroke vaccine regimen.
The timeline of European and American commitments remains unclear, leaving the possibility that many people worldwide still cannot get the vaccine.
But as the ONE study says, affluent countries will “do no favors to their own citizens” if they continue to stockpile the vaccines.
“If the virus can thrive in any part of the world, the risk of new variants increases and it’s only a matter of time before strains emerge that undermine the vaccines and tools developed to fight COVID-19,” reads the report. .
Such concerns prompted Mexico earlier this week to address the issue of deployment at the UN Security Council.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said his government wanted to see the UN address the vaccination and fairness of the UN so that “all countries have the opportunity to vaccinate their people.”
Russia and China have already started sending tens of thousands of doses of their COVID-19 vaccines to other developing and underdeveloped countries.
According to Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 tracker, more than 110 million people worldwide have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 62 million have recovered.