United Nations, Sep 22 (PTI) UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres condemned the efforts of some Countries to obtain the vaccines against the coronavirus only for their own use.
“We are working to advance treatments and therapies as a global public good – and backing efforts for a people’s vaccine available and affordable everywhere,” he said.
“Yet some countries are reportedly making side deals [on vaccine deliveries] exclusively for their own populations,” he noted. According to the secretary general “such “vaccinationalism” is not only unfair, it is self-defeating.” “None of us is safe, until all of us are safe,” he added.
handout photo made available by UN photo shows Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres
A few weeks ago we looked at the efforts by The Serum Institute in India, the world’s largest vaccine producer that announced a plan to make hundreds of millions of doses of an unproven inoculation. The company has teamed up with the Oxford scientists to produce the vaccine. It has also teamed up with other vaccine designers, at earlier stages of development, to manufacture four other vaccines, though those are not being mass produced yet. The Serum Institute in India is exclusively controlled by a small and fabulously rich Indian family and started out years ago as a horse farm, is doing what a few other companies in the race for a vaccine are doing: mass-producing hundreds of millions of doses of a vaccine candidate that is still in trials and might not even work.
Global charity Oxfam has warned that wealthy nations representing just 13 per cent of the world’s population have already cornered more than half (51 per cent) of the promised doses of leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates.
Oxfam said the efforts of rich countries, especially the US, to adopt a “me first” nationalistic approach prevents coordination and could prevent or delay the vaccine from reaching people who are at most risk, both living in developing countries and here at home.
The COVID-19 pandemic has so far infected over 30 million people and more than 958,000 people have died. The US, with 6.7 million infections, crossed the grim milestone of 200,000 deaths. According to WHO, there have been 31,174,627 confirmed cases of COVID-19, including 962,613 deaths, reported Globally to WHO as of 22 Sept 2020.
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