World at risk of ‘vaccine apartheid’: WHO chief

Highlighting the gap of vaccinations between high-income countries and low- and lower-middle-income countries, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Monday said that the world is at risk of ‘vaccine apartheid’.

Speaking at the Paris Peace Forum Spring Meeting, Ghebreyesus said, “I think I would go one step further and say not just that the world is at risk of vaccine apartheid, the world is in vaccine apartheid.”

“As you know, high-income countries account for 15 percent of the world’s population, but have 45 percent of the world’s vaccines. Low- and lower-middle countries account for almost half of the world’s population, but have received just 17 percent of the world’s vaccines. So the gap is really huge,” he further remarked.

The WHO chief also highlighted that at least 63 million doses of vaccines have been shipped to 124 countries and economies, but they represent just 0.5 percent of the combined population of those nations.

He also noted that the basic problem of vaccine inequity was a lack of sharing, which could be resolved by sharing financial resources to fully fund the Access to Covid-19 Tools (ACT) Accelerator, sharing doses with COVAX and sharing technology to scale up the manufacturing of vaccines.

“Even now, some high-income countries are moving to vaccinate children and adolescents, while health workers, older people and other at-risk groups around the world remain unvaccinated,” said Ghebreyesus.