WHO chief slams wealthy nations over ‘slow and unfair’ Covid vaccine delivery
▶ Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says the delay in distribution of doses is ‘economically and morally wrong’
Leaders of the world’s major health, financial and trade organisations are calling on wealthy nations to do more to ensure low-income countries receive equitable shares of Covid-19 vaccines.
They said the failure to do so thus far had inhibited the global recovery from the pandemic.
At a panel hosted by CNN, the leaders of the World Health Organisation, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organisation condemned Covid vaccine disparity.
They said data from the Global Dashboard for Vaccine Equity showed 61 per cent of people in high-income countries had received at least one shot, compared with fewer than 4 per cent of people in low-income nations.
Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said vaccine donations from rich countries have had little impact on ensuring populations in poor countries had adequate access. “The donations are not enough, and to be honest … very slow,” Dr Tedros said.
“It’s very disappointing that it’s taken so long for the world to really commit.
“Epidemiologically it’s wrong, because we cannot end this pandemic. Economically it’s wrong, because the economy, globally, is not recovering. And also morally, it’s wrong.”
He said 70 per cent of global Covid-19 vaccine deliveries had gone to only 10 countries, which was “completely unfair”.
Africa has received by far the fewest vaccines, with only 166 million doses delivered for the continent’s 1.2 billion people.
“This will not end the pandemic. And it’s in the interest of all countries – rich, poor or middle-income – to end this pandemic,” Dr Tedros said.
The WHO has set an ambitious goal of vaccinating 40 per cent of the global population by the end of the year and 70 per cent by the middle of 2022.
Dr Tedros called on the G20, the world’s 20 wealthiest nations comprising 80 per cent of the global economy, to “own this target and make it happen”.
“If there’s political commitment and they want to do it, they can do it,” he said.
Dr Tedros also criticised the decision by wealthy countries such as the US to start delivering booster shots given the Covid-19 vaccine shortage and global distribution disparity.
“So, for countries to move into boosters without even providing single doses in Africa is not right. It has to be stopped.”
But World Bank president David Malpass said he believed wealthy countries delivering booster shots was not a major factor in the vaccine disparity.
“Production is going up so rapidly that it may be enough to reach targets in 2022,” he said.
“The thing that I would emphasise is for finance ministers in countries and their health ministers to seek contracts to try to get delivery dates that are early, and to ask for them and to request them.
“And then for advanced economies to go along with that, to help get that delivery date.”
But WTO director general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said that “we cannot continue importing 99 per cent of our vaccines”, and that “we need to decentralise production to some of the countries that have no capacity”.
“The WTO will be working with manufactures of these vaccines to help them with their supply chain problems, monitoring where the bottlenecks are so that we can be able to increase production, and at the same time working with them to encourage them to set up manufacturing in emerging markets and developing countries.”
Ms Okonjo-Iweala said Pfizer had recently struck a deal with a South African company to start producing the vaccine there.
But on the same day as the panel convened, protests were held outside the US, Belgian and Dutch embassies.
The protesters called on those countries for quicker negotiations over a temporary waiver at the WTO for intellectual property rights, which would allow other companies to begin producing vaccines.
US President Joe Biden’s administration has backed the waiver this year. But the US executive director for Doctors Without Borders, Avril Benoit, said on Tuesday that the US “is now largely absent from the global effort to make it a reality”.
Dr Tedros said the global community should ask itself about the need to have the intellectual property waiver “if we’re not going to use it under such unprecedented conditions? This is really something, I can say, where humanity is failing miserably”.