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WHO: Jab inequality means pandemic will drag on

The Covid pandemic will “go on for a year longer than it needs to” because poorer countries are not getting the vaccines they need, the World Health Organisation (WHO) says.

Dr Bruce Aylward, senior leader at the WHO, said it meant the Covid crisis could “easily drag on deep into 2022”.

Less than 5 per cent of Africa’s population have been vaccinated, compared to 40 per cent on most other continents.

The UK has delivered more than 10 million vaccines to countries in need.

It has pledged a total of 100 million.

The original idea behind Covax was that all countries would be able to acquire vaccines from its pool, including wealthy ones. But most G7 countries decided to hold back once they started making their own one-to-one deals with pharmaceutical companies.

The vast majority of Covid vaccines overall have been used in high-income or upper middle-income countries. Africa accounts for just 2.6 per cent of doses administered globally.

The group of charities, which includes Oxfam and United Nations (UN) Aids, also criticised Canada and the UK for procuring vaccines for their own populations via Covax, the UN-backed global programme to distribute vaccines fairly.

Official figures show that earlier this year the UK received 539,370 Pfizer doses while Canada took just under a million Astra Zeneca doses.

Dr Aylward appealed to wealthy countries to give up their places in the queue for vaccines in order that pharmaceutical companies can prioritise the lowest-income countries instead.

He said wealthy countries needed to “stocktake” where they were with their donation commitments made at summits such as the G7 meeting in St Ives this summer.

The People’s Vaccine – an alliance of charities – has released new figures suggesting just one in seven of the doses promised by pharmaceutical companies and wealthy countries are actually reaching their destinations in poorer countries.

Oxfam’s Global Health Adviser, Rohit Malpani, acknowledged that Canada and the UK were technically entitled to get vaccines via this route having paid into the Covax mechanism, but he said it was still “morally indefensible” given that they had both obtained millions of doses through their own bilateral agreements. -BBC

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