‘Vaccine apartheid’: African leaders tell UN they need vaccines now

African countries whose populations have had little to no access to life-saving COVID vaccines have taken their urgent pleas directly to richer countries’ leaders at the United Nations annual General Assembly.

“No one is safe unless we are all safe,” was the common refrain.

“The virus doesn’t know continents, borders, even less nationalities or social statuses,” Chad’s President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, told the meeting of country leaders in New York.

A COVID-19 patient is treated in N’Djamena, Chad. While the world’s wealthier nations have stockpiled coronavirus vaccines for their citizens, many poorer countries are scrambling to secure enough doses.Credit: AP

“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 Organisation] in favour 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 African President Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to vaccines as “the greatest defence 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 per cent of the world’s vaccine doses have been acquired by wealthy countries, while less than 1 per cent has gone to low-income countries.”

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

Angolan 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 US, Britain, France, Germany and Israel are among the countries that have begun administering boosters or announced plans to do so. The US Centres for Disease Control cleared the use of booster Pfizer shots for older and frail Americans on Friday.

Namibian President Hage Geingob called it “vaccine apartheid”, a notable reference given the country’s own experience with apartheid when neighbouring South Africa’s white minority government controlled the country – then known as South West Africa – before its independence in 1990.

Namibia President Hage Geingob denounced the perceived “vaccine apartheid”, at the UN General Assembly in New York on THursday.Credit: Getty Images

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 was starting to ease in Africa “but with 108,000 new cases, more than 3000 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, US President Joe Biden announced that the United States would double its purchase of Pfizer’s COVID-19 shots to share with the world to 1 billion doses, with the goal of vaccinating 70 per cent of the global population within the next year.

The move comes as world leaders, aid groups and global health organisations have grown increasingly vocal about the slow pace of global vaccinations and the inequity of access to shots between residents of wealthier and poorer nations.

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

Biden, earlier this year, broke with European allies to embrace waivers to intellectual property rights for the vaccines, but there was no movement on Wednesday towards the necessary global consensus on the issue required under WTO rules.

While some nongovernmental organisations have called those waivers vital to boosting global production of the shots, US 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.

AP