Tuesday | January 26, 2021
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa voiced-out his concern at the World Economic Forum (WEF) address on Tuesday, Jan. 26 against countries he said were “hoarding vaccines”.
On his Twitter wall (@DrTedros) World Health Organisation (WHO) Director General, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted:
“Vaccine nationalism might serve short-term political goals. But it’s in every nation’s own medium and long-term economic interest to support vaccine equity. Until we end the pandemic everywhere, we won’t end it anywhere.”
The global outbreak of Covid-19 has highlighted many inequalities and inefficiencies within and among countries. With the discovery and manufacturing of vaccines from pharmaceutical firms, there has been unprecedented demand which has outstripped supply.
In his stern yet coaxing speech, he said “vaccine nationalism” where countries oversubscribe vaccines more than they need. Thus, disenfranchising other nations without the economic power to compete for the acquisition of the much sought after vaccines.
“As we speak, rich countries are rolling out vaccines, while the world’s least-developed countries watch and wait. Every day that passes, the divide grows larger between the world’s haves and have nots,” Dr. Ghebreyesus stressed.
Despite all efforts around the world to minimize and to stem out the scourge of coronavirus, the pandemic is raging as it were from the onset. Compounding the nations of the world’s problems is the emergence of Covid-19 variants. At least to this point there three known coronavirus strains detected: the United Kingdom one, the Brazilian kind and the South African variant.
As it emerges, vaccine manufacturers argue that the current regimen would be able to deal with Covid-19 variants. Except that AstraZeneca is embarking on developing a vaccine with booster characteristics for the South African variant. In any effect, vaccine producers are facing a monumental challenge of scaling up production to cope with global demand of colossal proportions.
Yet, Brazil, the United Kingdom and South Africa are battling the surge due to new coronavirus variants. The race has to be won everywhere for the world to succeed against the mutating coronavirus on the one hand and the development of vaccines, Kristalina Georgieva, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director, said on CNN interview with Christian Amanpour.
According to Johns Hopkins, the world has recorded 99, 900, 714 cases and 2, 146, 902 deaths.