By Bisola Adeyemo
United Nations Secretary-general, Antonio Guterres has slammed world leaders over inequality surrounding the global COVID-19 vaccines.
Antonio Guterres said this on Tuesday while speaking at the international organisation’s annual meeting saying, there is a surplus in some countries while other countries, especially in Africa remain unvaccinated.
According to him, Guterres stated that images of unused, expired COVID-19 vaccines in the garbage in wealthy countries while wide swaths of the world have not had much access to the vaccines tell “the tale of our times”.
He noted that this is more reason while the majority of people in wealthier nations have received at least one dose of the vaccine, global disparities persist. In Africa, 90 percent of people remain unvaccinated, he said.
“This is a moral indictment of the state of our world,” Guterres said. “It is an obscenity. We passed the science test. But we are getting an F in ethics.”
The UN returned to its annual in-person gathering in New York, Reuters reported. About one-third of world leaders travelled for the meeting, which was previously held virtually in 2020 due to the pandemic. Topics of discussion were set to include the pandemic and climate change.
Affluent and developed countries being able to vaccinate their citizens more than other nations risk prolonging the pandemic and increasing global inequality, according to a United Nations report issued on Sunday. Inequitable vaccine distribution leaves billions of people vulnerable—and also allows more deadly variants to emerge.
In low-income countries, the economic impacts of the pandemic could last until 2024, while high-income nations could reach their pre-pandemic per capita GDP growth rates by the end of 2021, according to the UN.
Over 60 percent of people in high-income countries have been vaccinated by September 15. In low-income nations, that number was only 3.07 percent, the United Nations Development Program reported.
Of the 5.7 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccines that have been administered across the world, only two per cent have been in Africa, vastly disproportionate to its percentage of the world population, Reuters reported.
Other officials have also drawn attention to vaccine inequity. In August, the World Health Organisation (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for a two-month delay on distributing booster shots, urging wealthy countries to share their doses with others—warning of “vaccine nationalism.”
“The virus will get the chance to circulate in countries with low vaccination coverage, and the Delta variant could evolve to become more virulent, and at the same time more potent variants could also emerge,” he said.
Others have warned that a focus on booster shots over immunising the rest of the world risks the emergence of more deadly variants.
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