More than 200 million Covid-19 vaccine doses have been administered across 107 countries and territories, AFP has reported, citing official data. Nearly a half of these have gone to the wealthy G7 club of nations.
Around 45 percent of injections were given in states belonging to the Group of Seven (G7), AFP said on Saturday.
The G7, which includes the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Japan, accounts for just 10 percent of the world’s population.
On Friday, the group promised to increase to $7.5 billion its collective support for the World Health Organization’s (WHO) vaccine distribution programs. The WHO’s Covax scheme is aimed at ring-fencing at least 1.3 billion vaccine doses for vulnerable populations worldwide in the coming months.
Since the start of the pandemic, the WHO has been insisting that poorer nations should have access to vaccination. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last month that it would be a “catastrophic moral failure” not to work on a fair and equal distribution of the vaccine. He warned that “vaccine nationalism” will exacerbate the global crisis and take a heavier toll on the wealthiest economies.
WHO spokesperson Margaret Harris advised the UK to share some of its vaccine stock with poorer countries once London finishes vaccinating its priority groups.
On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron told the Financial Times that Paris will allocate somewhere between four and five percent of its doses to Africa. Each country should “set aside a small number of the doses it has” and to transfer them to poorer nations, Macron said, adding that this gesture “won’t change our vaccination campaigns.”
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
