According to Guterres, it is unfair that so few countries control most of the world’s vaccine supply. To address inequality, the Secretary-General suggested that members of the G20 create an emergency task force to promote global access to vaccines.
“At this critical moment, vaccine equality is the biggest moral test before the world community,” he said during a virtual meeting with the UN Security Council on Wednesday.
Approximately 188 million vaccine doses have been administered worldwide, according to the digital database Our World in Data. Tens of millions of these doses have gone to the United States, China, the United Kingdom and Israel.
Guterres does not name the ten countries that administered three-quarters of all Covid-19 vaccines. But the US is definitely among them – more than 72.4 million vaccines have been distributed, and more than 56 million of them have been administered, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The proposed task force will include members of the group of 20. It consists of countries with the world’s largest economies, which will provide the money and scientific expertise to make vaccines more accessible to countries in the ‘Global South’, which include countries in Africa, Latin America and South America.
The task force will perform similar functions to COVAX, a Vaccine Alliance initiative known as Gavi and the World Health Organization (WHO). This initiative was created to buy vaccines in large quantities and send them to poorer countries that cannot compete with affluent countries to enter into contracts with the big drug companies.
COVAX is working to deliver 2 billion vaccine doses to countries in the Global South.
Guterres’ proposal comes the same week that Mexico has indicated it will lodge a complaint with the UN Security Council over the “unfair” deployment of vaccines, which, according to Foreign Minister Marcel Ebrard, benefits the richer countries.
Mexico, which has signed purchase agreements for the final delivery of more than 230 million doses of different Covid-19 vaccines, has so far delivered 750,000 doses.
In January, Guterres called on countries to share excess vaccine doses, and specifically to call out the richest countries in the world that have received millions of doses.
“The world’s leading economies have a special responsibility. Yet today we see a vaccine vacuum. Vaccines are reaching high-income countries fast, while the poorest in the world do not have one at all,” Guterres said in a video message last month. said.
CNN’s Tim Lister, Nectar Gan, Deidre McPhillips and Jonny Hallam contributed to this report.
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