Covid 19: We Need A Global Vaccination Plan

The slogan world leaders must adopt is, ‘No one is safe until everyone is safe,’ and get on with the job of ensuring enough vaccines are being manufactured, distributed, and delivered into people’s arms

- Michael Jansen

LONDON

The pledge to donate one billion doses of Covid vaccines for the worlds poor made by the Cornish summit of the Group of Seven (“G7”) wealthy democracies has been criticized as “too little, too late” by health professionals. While a portion of the donated doses will be delivered this year through the COVAX mechanism founded by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Gavi, the vaccination alliance, the rest — perhaps even the main portion — will not be available until next year. By that time Covid will mutate repeatedly, creating new forms which could resist existing vaccines.

Out of eight billion people in the world only 2.3 billion have been vaccinated.

Commenting on the G7 plan, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “For the first time in 75 years, the entire world faces the same enemy: Covid 19...We need a global vaccination plan.

We need to act with logic, with a sense of urgency, and with the priorities of a war economy, and we are still far from getting that.”

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the G7 pledges amounted to “passing round the begging bowl” rather than a real effort to tackle Covid. “It’s a catastrophic failure if we can’t go away in the next week or two… with a plan that actually rids the world of COVID now we’ve got a vaccine,” he told Reuters news agency.