LONDON: Richer countries are failing a “rudimentary” test of global solidarity by hoarding Covid vaccines, Amnesty International said Wednesday as it accused China and others of exploiting the pandemic to undermine human rights.
In its annual report, the campaigning rights organisation said the health crisis had exposed “broken” policies and that cooperation was the only way forward.
“The pandemic has cast a harsh light on the world’s inability to cooperate effectively and equitably,” said Agnes Callamard, who was appointed Amnesty’s secretary general last month.
“The richest countries have effected a near-monopoly of the world’s supply of vaccines, leaving countries with the fewest resources to face the worst health and human rights outcomes.”
Amnesty strongly criticized the decision by former US president Donald Trump to withdraw Washington from the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the pandemic – a step now reversed by Trump’s successor Joe Biden.
Callamard called for an immediate acceleration of the global vaccine roll-out, calling the inoculation campaign “a most fundamental, even rudimentary, test of the world’s capacity for cooperation”. Health officials have rolled out more than 510 million coronavirus vaccine doses around the world, but with big gaps between countries the WHO recently appealed to richer nations to donate vaccines to help poorer ones start inoculations.
Despite the huge effort to get jabs into arms, the pandemic is still surging in Europe and Latin America.
And the deployment of vaccines is chronically unequal, with the United States accounting for more than a quarter of the global total and poorer nations lagging far behind wealthier ones.
WHO called for millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses to be donated so every country can start immunizing. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for “10 million doses immediately as an urgent stop-gap measure so these 20 countries can start vaccinating their health workers and older people within the next two weeks”.
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