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UNITED NATIONS. — United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres reprimanded the world on Tuesday for the inequitable distribution of Covid-19 vaccines, describing it as an “obscenity” and giving the globe an “F in Ethics.”
Addressing the annual UN gathering of world leaders in New York, Guterres said images from some parts of the world of expired and unused vaccines in the garbage told “the tale of our times” — with the majority of the wealthier world immunised while more than 90 percent of Africa has not even received one dose.
“This is a moral indictment of the state of our world. It is an obscenity. We passed the science test. But we are getting an F in Ethics,” Guterres told the UN General Assembly.
World leaders returned to New York this year after a virtual event last year during the pandemic. As the coronavirus is still raging, about a third of the 193 UN states are again sending videos, but presidents, prime ministers and foreign ministers for the remainder have travelled to the United States.
Out of 5,7 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines administered around the world, only 2 percent have been in Africa. Guterres is pushing for a global plan to vaccinate 70 percent of the world by the first half of next year.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International has said six top manufacturers of the COVID-19 vaccine “are fuelling an unprecedented human rights crisis through their refusal to waive intellectual property rights and share vaccine technology”.
In the report released yesterday, titled “A Double Dose of Inequality”, the rights group denounced AstraZeneca, BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Novavax and Pfizer for “wheeling and dealing in favour of wealthy states”.
“It should be time to hail these companies, who created vaccines so quickly, as heroes. But instead, to their shame and our collective grief, Big Pharma’s intentional blocking of knowledge transfer and their wheeling and dealing in favour of wealthy states has brewed an utterly predictable and utterly devastating vaccine scarcity for so many others.” – Reuters-Al Jazeera.
Online Reporter