Group demands equal vaccine access
MEMBERS of a Global Justice group have called for equal access to Covid vaccines around the world.
The Global Justice group in Macclesfield met to highlight the inequalities in global distribution of the vaccines - which they called a ‘vaccine apartheid’.
In the UK, 70% of the population have had at least one vaccination while 57% have been double-jabbed.
This is in comparison to Nigeria, with a population of 201 million, where only 0.7% of the population have been fully vaccinated.
Also in India, only 7.6% of the 1.3 billion population have been fully vaccinated, in a country which has the biggest manufacturing capacity in the world.
Global Justice member Natalie Abbott said: “We welcome the announcement by the UK Government of a dispatch of a first batch of nine million vaccines to poorer countries but this is well overdue and amounts to a tiny fraction of the number of doses needed.
“Many countries also need assistance to get structures in place in order to utilise the doses effectively.
“We call upon Governments, members of the World Trade Organisation and pharmaceutical companies to work together to share resources, vaccines, treatments and technical know how across borders so that the whole world can get vaccinated at an affordable cost.”
The group said they applaud the efforts of the scientists who worked tirelessly to develop effective vaccines and the public and private organisations who funded the work. They also said they recognised ‘the complexities of rolling out vaccines in many parts of the world where populations may not enjoy adequate health care facilities or may be difficult to reach’.
Natalie added: “Global Justice Now highlights the contrast between the UK with 82.3 million doses of Covid vaccines (for a population of 68 million) compared to 59.1 million doses so far for the whole of Africa with a population of 1340 million and that at the current rate of vaccination it will take until 2024 for the
Global South to have protection from COVID.
“This reflects a failure on the part of the global community to secure mechanisms to distribute the vaccines globally at pace as they became available.”
The group also quoted Director General Dr
Tedros Adhranom Ghebreyesus of the World Health Organisation who described the situation ‘as a catastrophic moral failure’.
He said: “The price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”