G7 to donate 1 billion jabs
Leading economies feel joint approach is best to recover from Covid-19
Carbis Bay, June 11: G7 leaders gathered on Friday for their first inperson talks in nearly two years, with an expected pledge to donate one billion Covid vaccine doses to poor countries on the agenda in a show of Western democratic cohesion.
The club of leading economies — Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and United States — say a joint approach is the world's best chance for recovering from the global health crisis, and tackling climate change.
President Joe Biden has set the tone, ditching Donald Trump’s isolationist stance to ram home a message of resolve by the
G7 and NATO against both Beijing and Moscow, as he heads into his first sit-down with Russian President Vladimir Putin next week in Geneva.
“The driving animating purpose of this G7 summit is to show that democracy can deliver against the biggest challenges we’re facing in the world,” a senior US administration official said.
Campaigners say the
G7’s vaccine donations pledge for this year and next — including 500 million US doses — is far too little, too late to end a pandemic that has claimed over 3.7 million lives worldwide.
“If the best G7 leaders can manage is to donate one billion vaccine doses then this summit will have been a failure,” Oxfam said, insisting the world needs 11 billion doses. But the G7 has recognised it needs to rise to competing “vaccine diplomacy” efforts launched by China and Russia, with the Biden administration stressing it expects nothing in return for its donated jabs.
G7 leaders meeting at the seaside resort of Carbis Bay in Cornwall, southwest England, are also expected to outline more help for developing nations to build up infrastructure, as a counterpoint to the debt-fuelled spending by China in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The initiative “will embrace a high standards, transparent, climate friendly, non-corrupt mechanism” for infrastructure investment in the developing world, the US official said. “It will be an alternative to that which other countries, including China, are offering.” Underpinning the US-led diplomatic revival, Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday adopted a new “Atlantic Charter”, modelled on the pact signed by their World War II predecessors to help build a new world order.
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