Injecting sanity
Rich countries must find £22billion to vaccinate everyone on the planet
GORDON Brown makes a good point when he says vaccine nationalism – or vaccine apartheid as he calls it – simply will not work.
He is right to call on the G7 group of rich nations to commit to a global immunisation drive to make sure the virus is defeated.
The former Labour prime minister said the UK should use June’s G7 summit in Cornwall to rekindle the moral purpose of the Make Poverty History campaign, which saw the Labour government take the lead in helping poorer nations with debt relief and increased aid.
We now have a Tory Government cutting foreign aid from the previous 0.7 per cent guarantee of national income.
But by simply reversing that cut we could pay for the UK contribution to a worldwide vaccine drive. There really is no other logical course of action to keep us all safe.
THE G7 nations should commit £22billion a year as part of a “Herculean” push for global vaccination, Gordon Brown has said.
The former prime minister has called for the mass vaccination of the world to be the primary focus of the G7 summit, which starts on June 11 in Cornwall.
US President Joe Biden is expected to attend, along with the other G7 leaders from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the EU.
Writing in The Guardian, Brown said G7 nations must spearhead a “Herculean mobilisation” of pharmaceutical firms, national militaries and health workers to reach the “greatest number of people in the shortest time across the widest geography.”
He writes: “As things stand, affluent countries accounting for 18 per cent of the world’s population have bought 4.6billion doses – 60 per cent of confirmed orders. About 780million vaccines have been administered to date, but less than one per cent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa have been injected.
“Immunising the West but only a fraction of the developing world is already fuelling allegations of ‘vaccine apartheid’ and will leave Covid-19 spreading, mutating and threatening the lives and livelihoods of us all for years to come.”
Vaccines are shared internationally under the World Health Organisationbacked Covax programme, which is working to provide vaccines for low and middle-income countries.
However, Brown said the issue is not a shortage in the number of vaccines but the “shortage of money to pay for them”, adding the funds needed to end the global crisis “are a fraction of the trillions Covid is costing us”.
He said: “We need to spend now to save lives and we need to spend tomorrow to carry on vaccinating each year until the disease no longer claims lives. And this will require at least £22billion a year, a bill no one seems willing to fully underwrite.”
Meanwhile, the SNP yesterday said they will invest £5million in the foreign aid budget to help developing countries recover from Covid-19 if re-elected.
The current budget of £10million is used to help people in Malawi, Pakistan, Zambia and Rwanda.
International development minister Jenny Gilruth said: “If re-elected, the SNP Government will increase the International Development Fund by 50 per cent, from £10million to £15million, and commit to further increases in line with inflation.”