Former Prime Minister Helen Clark says the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to wreak havoc globally unless rich nations "share the burden" and help vaccinate poorer countries.
"If we're to end this pandemic, we need 70 per cent of the global population (according to the head of the World Health Organisation) vaccinated by the time the G7 meets in June next year. On the level of [vaccine] pledge we're seeing, and we're not going to meet that," she said in a webinar last night hosted by the Helen Clark Foundation.
"That means this disease is going to carry on in pandemic phase - which is ghastly. We need to see it coming off the accelerating pandemic, down to the point where it becomes somewhat endemic, and ideally, if more countries follow the approach of New Zealand and Australia - squashing it, eliminating it where it appears - we might even see an end to it one day.
"But the redistribution of existing vaccine orders from the high-income countries like ours is clearly important." ...
Group of Seven (G-7) leaders on Sunday called for a renewed, "transparent" investigation into the origins of the coronavirus and pledged to give 1 billion vaccine doses to countries in need as their weekend of meetings in the United Kingdom came to an end.
Leaders of the major industrial nations have pledged one billion Covid vaccine doses to poor countries as a "big step towards vaccinating the world", Boris Johnson has said.
With COVID-19 vaccine supplies shifting from scarcity to abundance in high-income settings, such as Canada, the EU, the USA, and the UK, the June 11–13, 2021, Group of Seven (G7) summit in Cornwall, UK, is the time when leaders from those countries should act on their promises to send surplus COVID-19 vaccine supplies to the many other countries where doses remain scarce.
Vaccine donations are not the only solution to the gap that has emerged between countries with and without sufficient doses of COVID-19 vaccines. Yet, the potential number of surplus vaccine doses purchased by G7 nations is likely to be in the hundreds of millions or more.
Vaccine manufacturers based in those countries have also offered to sell more than a billion doses at cost for use in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs) in 2021, which G7 governments could buy and donate.
