G20 leaders need to fulfill their dose-sharing pledges by September-end 2021, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged countries at health meet in Rome
World leaders need to fulfill their pledges to share novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccines by September-end 2021, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General, World Health Organization (WHO) urged G20 countries at the health ministers meeting in Rome September 5.
They need to facilitate the sharing of technology, know-how and intellectual property to support regional COVID-19 vaccine manufacturing, he added.
G20 health ministers, in their last meeting in Riyadh a year ago, had hoped the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic would be under control by now. But the situation continues to spiral out of control, and vaccine inequity continues to afflict several countries.
Ghebreyesus said:
Many countries continue to face steep increases in cases and deaths, despite the fact that more than 5 billion vaccines have now been administered worldwide. But almost 75 per cent of those doses have been administered in just 10 countries. Africa has the lowest vaccination coverage at 2 per cent. This is unacceptable.
He called the G20 leaders as the largest producers, consumers and donors of COVID-19 vaccines, who hold the key to achieving vaccine equity and ending the pandemic.
The director-general outlined four major areas of action:
He requested the health ministers to empower the WHO by supporting initiatives that strengthen, and not weaken, its mandate. He urged them to commit to a historic reversal of the current imbalance between assessed and voluntary contributions.
“We can never allow a pandemic on this scale to happen again. And we can never allow an injustice like this to happen again,” he added.
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