French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday appealed to fellow European nations and the United States to do whatever it can to give up to five percent of their current COVID-19 vaccine supplies to developing countries in Africa, while subtly revealing that poorer nations are paying ‘astronomical prices’ for jabs being made in the West.
Macron described the present distribution of doses marked as an ‘unprecedented acceleration of global inequality and questioned why the European Union was paying less for vaccines such as the one produced by Oxford-AstraZeneca while most African countries have to pay almost three times that for the same product.
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‘We are allowing the idea to take hold that hundreds of millions of vaccines are being given in rich countries and that we are not starting in poor countries,’ Macron told the Financial Times newspaper ahead of a G7 meeting by video link.
‘It’s an unprecedented acceleration of global inequality,” he added. “It’s unacceptable when a vaccine exists to reduce the chances of a woman or a man according to the place where they happen to live.’
Macron’s comments came after the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday denounced the ‘wildly uneven and unfair‘ global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, pointing out that just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations.
Rich nations, such as the United Kingdom and Canada, have ordered enough doses to vaccinate their populations more than once. By contrast, many African and Latin American nations have insufficient stocks to innoculate all of their citizens even once.
AFRICA TODAY NEWS, NEW YORK