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Nine out of 10 people in dozens of poor countries could lose the opportunity to get vaccinated against COVID-19 next year because rich countries have accumulated far more doses than they need, activists said Wednesday.
Rich nations that are home to 14% of the world’s population had purchased 53% of the total stock of the most promising vaccines as of last month, said the People’s Vaccine Alliance, a coalition that includes Oxfam, Amnesty International and Global Justice Now.
They said pharmaceutical companies working on COVID-19 vaccines should openly share their technology and intellectual property through the World Health Organization (WHO) so that more doses can be manufactured.
“This should not be a battle between countries to ensure sufficient doses,” Mohga Kamal-Yanni, an advisor to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“During these unprecedented times of a global pandemic, people’s lives and livelihoods must come before the profits of pharmaceutical companies,” he added.
While high-risk groups in Britain received the first injection of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech on Tuesday, most people in 67 low- and lower-middle-income countries, including Bhutan, Ethiopia and Haiti, are at risk. to be left behind, they said.
Among the three COVID-19 vaccines for which efficacy results have been announced, nearly all available doses of two of them, Moderna and Pfizer / BioNTech, have been purchased by wealthy countries, according to the Alliance report.
While AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford have committed to providing 64% of their doses to people in developing countries, that would only reach 18% of the world’s population by next year “at the most,” he added.
The activists used data from the scientific information and analysis company Airfinity to analyze agreements made between the countries and eight major vaccine candidates, including Sinovac of China and Sputnik V. of Russia.
The EU, the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Australia, Hong Kong, Macao, New Zealand, Israel and Kuwait have acquired 53% of these potential doses, and Canada has bought enough to vaccinate five times its population, Oxfam said. .
“By purchasing the vast majority of the world’s vaccine supply, rich countries are failing to fulfill their human rights obligations,” Steve Cockburn, Director of Economic and Social Justice at Amnesty International, said in a statement. —Reuters
