[“No one is safe unless we are all safe.” That message was
repeated throughout the day to world leaders assembled at the UN, as
the inequity of vaccine distribution came into sharp focus.]
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‘VACCINE APARTHEID’: AFRICANS TELL UN THEY NEED VACCINES  
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Pia Sarkar
September 23, 2021
AP
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_ “No one is safe unless we are all safe.” That message was
repeated throughout the day to world leaders assembled at the UN, as
the inequity of vaccine distribution came into sharp focus. _

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa speaks to 76 UN General
Assembly,

 

As wealthy countries begin to consider whether to offer their
populations a third COVID-19 shot, African nations still waiting for
their first gave this stark reminder to world leaders at the U.N.
General Assembly on Thursday: “No one is safe unless we are all
safe.”

That message was repeated throughout the day as the inequity of
vaccine distribution came into sharp focus. As of
mid-September, fewer than 4% of Africans have been fully immunized
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most of the 5.7 billion vaccine doses administered around the world
have been given in just 10 rich countries.

Chad’s president Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno warned of the dangers of
leaving countries behind.

“The virus doesn’t know continents, borders, even less
nationalities or social statuses,” Itno told the General Assembly.
“The countries and regions that aren’t vaccinated will be a source
of propagating and developing new variants of the virus. In this
regard, we welcome the repeated appeals of the United Nations
secretary general and the director general of the (World Health
Organization) in favor of access to the vaccine for all. The salvation
of humanity depends on it.”

The struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic has featured
prominently in leaders’ speeches over the past few days — many of
them delivered remotely exactly because of the virus. Country after
country acknowledged the wide disparity in accessing the vaccine,
painting a picture so bleak that a solution has at times seemed
impossibly out of reach.

South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to vaccines as
“the greatest defense that humanity has against the ravages of this
pandemic.”

“It is therefore a great concern that the global community has not
sustained the principles of solidarity and cooperation in securing
equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines,” he said. “It is an
indictment on humanity that more than 82% of the world’s vaccine
doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1% has
gone to low-income countries.”

He and others urged U.N. member states to support a proposal to
temporarily waive certain intellectual property rights established by
the World Trade Organization to allow more countries, particularly
low- and middle-income countries, to produce COVID-19 vaccines.

Earlier this year, U.S. President Joe Biden broke with European allies
to embrace the waivers, but there has been no movement toward the
necessary global consensus on the issue required under WTO rules.

While some nongovernmental organizations have called the waivers vital
to boosting global production of the shots, U.S. officials concede it
is not the most constricting factor in the inequitable vaccine
distribution — and some privately doubt the waivers for the highly
complex shots would lead to enhanced production.

Angola President João Lourenço said it was “shocking to see the
disparity between some nations and others with respect to availability
of vaccines.”

“These disparities allow for third doses to be given, in some cases,
while, in other cases, as in Africa, the vast majority of the
population has not even received the first dose,” Lourenço said.

The U.S., Britain, France, Germany and Israel are among the countries
that have begun administering boosters or announced plans to do so.

Namibia President Hage Geingob called it “vaccine apartheid,” a
notable reference given the country’s own experience with apartheid
when neighboring South Africa’s white minority government controlled
South West Africa, the name for Namibia before its independence in
1990.

“There is a virus far more terrible, far more harrowing than
COVID19. It is the virus of inequality,” said the president of the
Indian Ocean island nation of the Seychelles, Wavel Ramkalawan.

The grim consequences of COVID-19 hit Tanzania especially hard when
the East African country’s then-president John Magufuli, who had
insisted the coronavirus could be defeated with prayer, died in March.
The presidency went to his deputy, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who has
since changed Tanzania’s course
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the pandemic but still sees great challenges ahead.

“We tend to forget that no one is safe until everyone is safe,”
she said during her speech Thursday, stressing the importance of
countries with surplus COVID-19 vaccine doses sharing them with other
countries.

Benido Impouma, a program director with the WHO’s Africa program,
noted during a weekly video news conference that the surge in new
COVID-19 cases is starting to ease in Africa “but with 108,000 new
cases, more than 3,000 lives lost in the past week and 16 countries
still in resurgence, this fight is far from over.”

“Fresh increases in cases should be expected in the coming
months,” Impouma said. “Without widespread vaccination and other
public and social measures, the continent’s fourth wave is likely to
be the worst, the most brutal yet.”

On Wednesday, during a global vaccination summit convened virtually on
the sidelines of the General Assembly, Biden announced that the United
States would double its purchase
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Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots to share with the world to 1 billion doses,
with the goal of vaccinating 70% of the global population within the
next year.

Lack of access to vaccines is not just Africa’s concern. Leaders of
developing nations in different regions echoed the frustration.
President Luis Arce of Bolivia, one of Latin America’s poorest
nations, told assembled diplomats that biopharmaceutical companies
should make their patents available and share knowledge and technology
for vaccine production.

“Access to the vaccine should be considered a human right. We cannot
be indifferent, much less profit from health in pandemic times,”
Arce said.

Earlier on Thursday, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel stressed
that “hundreds of millions of people in low-income nations still
await their first dose, and can’t even guess whether they will ever
receive it.”

The WHO says only 15% of promised donations of vaccines — from rich
countries that have access to large quantities of them — have been
delivered. The U.N. health agency has said it wants countries to
fulfill their dose-sharing pledges “immediately” and make shots
available for programs that benefit poor countries and Africa in
particular.

_Associated Press writers Carley Petesch in Dakar, Senegal, Zeke
Miller in Washington, David Biller in Rio de Janeiro and Mallika Sen
in New York contributed to this report. Follow Pia Sarkar on Twitter
at [link removed] [[link removed]]_

 

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