African leaders decry ‘vaccine apartheid’
Warnings of new variants emerging unless deep inequalities addressed
As wealthy countries move towards offering their populations a third Covid-19 shot, African nations still waiting for their first gave this stark reminder to world leaders at the UN General Assembly yesterday: “No one is safe unless we are all safe.”
That message was repeated throughout the day as the inequity of vaccine distribution came into sharp focus. As of mid-September, fewer than 4 per cent of Africans have been fully immunised and most of the 5.7 billion vaccine doses administered around the world have been given in just 10 rich countries.
Chad’s president Mahamat Idriss Dby Itno warned of the dangers of leaving countries behind.
“The virus doesn’t know continents, borders, even less nationalities or social statuses,” Itno told the General Assembly. “The countries and regions that aren’t vaccinated will be a source of propagating and developing new variants of the virus. In this regard, we welcome the repeated appeals of the United Nations secretary general and the director general of the [World Health Organisation] in favour of access to the vaccine for all. The salvation of humanity depends on it.”
The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic has featured prominently in leaders’ speeches over the past few days — many of them delivered remotely because of the virus. Country after country acknowledged the wide disparity in accessing the vaccine, painting a picture so bleak that a solution has at times seemed impossibly out of reach.
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to vaccines as “the greatest defence humanity has against the ravages of this pandemic”.
“It is an indictment on humanity that more than 82 per cent of the world’s vaccine doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1 per cent has gone to lowincome countries.”
He and others urged UN member states to support a proposal to temporarily waive certain intellectual property rights to allow more countries, particularly low- and middle-income countries, to produce Covid-19 vaccines.
Earlier this year, US President Joe Biden broke with European allies to embrace the waivers, but there has been no movement toward the necessary global consensus on the issue required under WTO rules.
Namibia President Hage Geingob called it “vaccine apartheid”, a notable reference given the country’s own experience with apartheid when neighbouring South Africa’s white minority government controlled South West Africa, the name for Namibia before its independence in 1990.
The grim consequences of Covid19 hit Tanzania especially hard when the East African country’s thenpresident John Magufuli, who had insisted the coronavirus could be defeated with prayer, died in March. The presidency went to his deputy, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who has since changed Tanzania’s course on the pandemic but still sees great challenges ahead.
“We tend to forget that no one is safe until everyone is safe,” she said during her speech yesterday, stressing the importance of countries with surplus Covid-19 vaccine doses sharing them with other countries.
Benido Impouma, a programme director with the WHO’s Africa programme, noted during a weekly video news conference that the surge in new Covid-19 cases is starting to ease in Africa “but with 108,000 new cases, more than 3000 lives lost in the past week and 16 countries still in resurgence, this fight is far from over”.
“Fresh increases in cases should be expected in the coming months,” Impouma said. “Without widespread vaccination and other public and social measures, the continent’s fourth wave is likely to be the worst, the most brutal yet.”
The WHO says only 15 per cent of promised donations of vaccines — from rich countries that have access to large quantities of them — have been delivered. The UN health agency has said it wants countries to fulfil their dose-sharing pledges “immediately” and make shots available for programs that benefit poor countries and Africa in particular.