Pope calls for ‘vaccines for all’

POPE Francis has made a Christmas Day plea for authorities to make Covid-19 vaccines available to all, insisting that the first in line should be the most vulnerable and needy, regardless of who holds the patents.

“Vaccines for everybody, especially for the most vulnerable and needy,” Francis said in off-the-cuff remarks away from his prepared text, calling the development of such vaccines “light of hope” for the world.

“We can’t let closed nationalisms impede us from living as the true human family that we are,” he said.

He called on the leaders of nations, businesses and international organisations to “promote co-operation and not competition, and to search for a solution for all”.

Amid a surge of coronavirus infections this autumn in Italy, Francis broke with tradition for Christmas. Instead of delivering his Urbi et Orbi speech - Latin for “to the city and to the world” - from the central loggia of St Peter’s Square, he read it from inside a cavernous hall at the Apostolic Palace, flanked by two Christmas trees with blinking lights. “At this moment in history, marked by the ecological crisis and grave economic and social imbalances only worsened by the coronavirus pandemic, it is all the more important for us to acknowledge one another as brothers and sisters,” he said.