WHO warns pandemic will drag on into 2022
The Covid pandemic will "go on for a year longer than
it needs to" because poorer countries are not getting the vaccines they
need, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
Dr Bruce Aylward, senior leader at the WHO, said it meant
the Covid crisis could "easily drag on deep into 2022".
Less than 5% of Africa's population have been vaccinated,
compared to 40% on most other continents.
The UK has delivered more than 10 million vaccines to
countries in need.
It has pledged a total of 100 million.
Dr Aylward appealed to wealthy countries to give up their
places in the queue for vaccines in order that pharmaceutical companies can
prioritise the lowest-income countries instead.
He said wealthy countries needed to "stocktake"
where they were with their donation commitments made at summits such as the G7
meeting in St Ives this summer.
"I can tell you we're not on track" he said.
"We really need to speed it up or you know what? This pandemic is going to
go on for a year longer than it needs to."
The People's Vaccine - an alliance of charities - has released
new figures suggesting just one in seven of the doses promised by
pharmaceutical companies and wealthy countries are actually reaching their
destinations in poorer countries.
The vast majority of Covid vaccines have been given in high-income or upper middle-income countries. Africa accounts for just 2.6% of doses administered globally.
The group of charities, which includes Oxfam and UNAids, also criticised Canada and the UK for procuring vaccines for their own populations via Covax, the UN-backed global programme to distribute vaccines fairly.
Official figures show that earlier this year the UK received 539,370 Pfizer doses while Canada took just under a million AstraZeneca doses.
The original idea behind Covax was that all countries would be able to acquire vaccines from its pool, including wealthy ones. But most G7 countries decided to hold back once they started making their own one-to-one deals with pharmaceutical companies.
Oxfam's Global Health Adviser, Rohit Malpani, acknowledged
that Canada and the UK were technically entitled to get vaccines via this route
having paid into the Covax mechanism, but he said it was still "morally
indefensible" given that they had both obtained millions of doses through
their own bilateral agreements.
"They should not have been acquiring these doses from
Covax," he said. "It's nothing better than double-dipping and means
that poorer countries which are already at the back of the queue, will end up
waiting longer."
The UK government pointed out it was one of the countries
which had "kick-started" Covax last year with a donation of £548m.
The Canadian government was keen to stress that it had now
ceased to use Covax vaccines.
The country's International Development Minister, Karina
Gould, said: "As soon as it became clear that the supply we had secured
through our bilateral deals would be sufficient for the Canadian population, we
pivoted the doses which we had procured from Covax back to Covax, so they could
be redistributed to developing countries."
Covax originally aimed to deliver two billion doses of
vaccines by the end of this year, but so far it has shipped 371m doses.
This story has not been edited by Blueplanet staff and is
published from a syndicated feed
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