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WHO SCORES INEQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF COVID-19 VACCINES
- By The Financial District
- Mar 24, 2021
- 2 min read
The "inequitable distribution" of COVID-19 vaccines worldwide is becoming "more grotesque every day," the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday, renewing calls for more solidarity, according to Euronews.
"The gap between the number of vaccines administered in rich countries, and the number of vaccines administered through COVAX is growing every single day, and becoming more grotesque every day," WHO chief Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus Adhanom told reporters.
"Countries that are now vaccinating younger, healthy people at low risk of disease are doing so at the cost of the lives of health workers, older people, and other at-risk groups in other countries.
"The world’s poorest countries wonder whether rich countries really mean what they say when they talk about solidarity," he added.
COVAX is a vaccine distribution initiative co-led by the WHO. It aims for the COVID-19 vaccines to have been rolled out in all countries within the first 100 days of 2021, including in 92 lower-income economies, and for about 20 percent of the population of every country to have been inoculated by the end of the year.
About 448 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have so far been administered worldwide. The US, UK and EU/EEA together account for over 206 million of the doses administered.
Meanwhile, over 31 million doses had been delivered to 57 countries through the COVAX program as of Monday.
Overall, only 0.1 percent of doses administered worldwide have been administered in "low-income" countries, while "high-income" countries (16 percent of the world's population) account for more than half of the doses injected.
Dr. Tedros stressed that "the inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage. It’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating."
"Some countries are racing to vaccinate their entire populations while other countries have nothing. This may buy short-term security, but it’s a false sense of security."
"The more transmission, the more variants. And the more variants that emerge, the more likely it is that they will evade vaccines."
