Boris Johnson’s neocolonial pandemic response

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Hi John,

Today Boris Johnson is attending the Commonwealth summit in Rwanda just a week after the UK blocked a proposal at the World Trade Organization to massively expand the production of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments across the global south.

We are asking the prime minister how he will explain to the leaders of former British colonies and others why he has spent 18 months propping up global vaccine apartheid on behalf of big pharmaceutical companies?

Will you call Boris Johnson out for propping up vaccine apartheid?

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Almost everyone in the UK has been offered at least three Covid-19 vaccine doses, and anyone who catches Covid has immediate access to all available tests and treatments. By contrast, more than a billion people in Commonwealth member states have yet to be offered a single jab. Pharmaceutical companies have made billions in profits from the pandemic while millions of people have died.

Even the pathetically inadequate scraps from the table the UK has offered the global south in the course of the pandemic have not been delivered. More than a year after the UK pledged to donate 100 million vaccine doses at the G7 in Cornwall, less than 40 million have been delivered.

Even more shockingly, the UK has tried to use its meagre donations as an alibi for its failure to back a deal that could have helped countries in the global south to produce their own vaccines and treatments. Its approach to the pandemic has been nothing short of neocolonial, obstructing efforts by countries in the global south to take matters into their own hands, while touting its own ‘charity’.

Vaccinating the world is the biggest and most practical call of all on the Covid-19 pandemic – to save lives and prevent new, possibly more dangerous variants – and Boris Johnson has repeatedly got it completely wrong.

We've written an open letter to the prime minister to call him out on this disastrous failure. Together, we can make sure he doesn't get away with it.

Thank you for all your support,

Tim Bierley, Pharma Campaigner
Global Justice Now

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