WHO warns that the covid epidemic could drag on until 2022

The Covid pandemic will "go on for a year longer than it needs to" because poorer countries are not getting the vaccines they need, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.

 

The UK has delivered more than 10 million vaccines to countries in need. He said wealthy countries needed to "stocktake" where they were with their donation commitments made at summits such as the G7 meeting in St Ives this summer.

 

The People's Vaccine - an alliance of charities - has released new figures suggesting just one in seven of the doses promised by pharmaceutical companies and wealthy countries are actually reaching their destinations in poorer countries.

 

The original idea behind Covax was that all countries would be able to acquire vaccines from its pool, including wealthy ones. Oxfam's Global Health Adviser, Rohit Malpani, acknowledged that Canada and the UK were technically entitled to get vaccines via this route having paid into the Covax mechanism, but he said it was still "morally indefensible" given that they had both obtained millions of doses through their own bilateral agreements.