G7 LEADERS TARGET 1B JABS
Pledge to donate vaccine doses to the poorest nations
G7 leaders met yesterday for their first in-person talks in nearly two years, with an expected pledge to donate one billion Covid-19 vaccine doses to the world’s poorest countries, as part of a show of Western democratic unity against the planet’s most pressing issues.
The club of leading economies — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and United States — said a joint approach was the world’s best chance for recovering from the global health crisis and tackling climate change.
President Joe Biden set the tone on Wednesday, ditching
Donald Trump’s isolationist stance on global affairs to ram home a message of resolve by the G7 and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation against both Beijing and Moscow as he heads on to 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 United States administration official said.
Campaigners said the G7’s inoculations pledge for this year and next, including 500 million US doses, was far too little, too late to end a pandemic that had claimed more than 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 needed 11 billion doses instead.
But the G7 has recognised it needs to mobilise against the “vaccine diplomacy” launched by the rollout of Chinese and Russian jabs, with the Biden administration stressing it expects nothing in return.
The 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 2 predecessors to help build a new world order.
Johnson dislikes the decadesold phrase “special relationship”, arguing it makes Britain look subservient to Washington, telling the BBC instead that it should be viewed as “indestructible”.
British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab hit back yesterday after French President Emmanuel Macron launched a broadside over UK backpedalling regarding special post-Brexit arrangements for the restive province.
Raab told Sky News that “change must come from the European Commission side” and that “we are not negotiating or haggling the integrity of the United Kingdom”.
On Thursday, more than 3,000 pro-UK loyalists staged a protest in Belfast against the “protocol” that effectively keeps Northern Ireland in the European Union customs union and single market.