Credit, AFP
A shipment of Covax vaccines arrived in Sudan in early October
The covid-19 pandemic will “last a year longer than necessary” because the poorest countries are not getting the vaccines they need, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
Bruce Aylward, a senior WHO official, said this meant the Covid crisis could “easily drag into 2022”.
Less than 5% of the African population has been vaccinated, compared to 40% on most other continents.
The UK has distributed over 10 million vaccines to countries in need. And promised a total of 100 million.
Aylward urged rich countries to give up their place in the vaccine queue so pharmaceutical companies can prioritize low-income countries.
Rich countries, he said, must “take stock” to see where they stand with their pledges – made, for example, at the G7 summit in June in Cornwall, southwest England.
“I can say that we are not on the right track,” he said.
“Do we really need to step up, or do you know what’s going to happen? This pandemic is going to last a year longer than necessary.”
The People’s Vaccine – an alliance of charities – has released new figures suggesting that only one in seven doses promised by pharmaceutical companies and rich countries actually reach their destinations in poorer countries.
The vast majority of covid vaccines have been applied in high-income or upper-middle-income countries. Africa represents only 2.6% of the doses administered worldwide.
The group of charities, which includes Oxfam and UNAids, also criticized Canada and the UK for obtaining vaccines for their own populations through Covax, the UN-backed global program to distribute vaccines fairly.
Official data shows that at the start of this year, the UK received 539,370 doses from Pfizer, while Canada bought just under a million doses from AstraZeneca.
The original idea behind Covax was that all countries could buy vaccines through the consortium, including the wealthy. But most G7 countries opted out when they started making their own individual deals with pharmaceutical companies.
Oxfam global health consultant Rohit Malpani acknowledged that Canada and the UK technically had the right to obtain vaccines in this way, having invested resources in the Covax initiative, but added that c was still “morally indefensible”, as the two had obtained millions of doses through their own bilateral deals.
“They shouldn’t have had those doses of Covax,” he said.
“It’s nothing more than double dipping (English term which means “to obtain resources from two sources at the same time”), and that means that the poorest countries, which are already at the end of the line, will wait longer. »
The UK government has pointed out that it was one of the countries that ‘launched’ Covax last year with a £548million donation.
And the Canadian government was keen to point out that it had now stopped using Covax vaccines.
“Once it became clear that the supply we had obtained through our bilateral agreements would be sufficient for the Canadian population, we transferred the doses we had purchased from Covax to Covax so that they could be redistributed in developing countries,” said Karina Gould, the country’s minister for international development.
Covax originally planned to deliver 2 billion doses of vaccines by the end of this year, but has so far delivered 371 million doses.
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