The World Health Organization urged countries on Friday to donate Covid-19 vaccine doses to inoculate the most vulnerable in 20 poorer nations after India, a key supplier to the agency’s Covax Facility vaccine-sharing programme, said it was prioritising local needs.
WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the Covax programme, run with the Gavi vaccine alliance, needed 10 million doses immediately to inoculate health care workers and older people as a stopgap measure.
“Covax is ready to deliver but we can’t deliver vaccines we don’t have. Bilateral deals, export bans, vaccine nationalism and vaccine diplomacy have caused distortions in the market with gross inequities in supply and demand,” Tedros told a news conference.
“Ten million doses is not much and it’s not nearly enough,” he said.
Tedros has said countries should work together to ensure Covid-19 vaccinations begin everywhere across the world within the first 100 days of 2021, or by April 10.
WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward said that talks with well-supplied countries about donations were under way and that some had expressed “positive interest”, without naming them.
Meanwhile a long-awaited report into the origins of the novel coronavirus, following a WHO team trip to Wuhan, China in January and February, would be released in the next few days, team leader Peter Ben Embarek said.
WHO’s member states will receive it first before it is made public, he said.
(SCMP)
