The Riverside Press-Enterprise
‘Vaccine apartheid’: Africans tell U.N. they need vaccines
NEW YORK >> The inequity of COVID-19 vaccine distribution came into sharp focus Thursday as many of the African countries whose populations have little to no access to the life-saving shots spoke at the U.N.’S annual meeting of world leaders. Some called for member states to relax intellectual property rights in order to expand vaccine production.
“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 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 struggle to contain the pandemic has featured prominently in leaders’ speeches over the past few days — many of them delivered remotely exactly because of the virus.
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa pointed to vaccines as “the greatest defense that humanity has against the ravages of this pandemic.”
“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 vaccines.
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.