World's Richest Countries Buying 1 Billion Excess COVID-19 Vaccines Doses - Report
LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 19th February, 2021) Some of the world's richest countries are on track to stockpile over one billion more doses of the COVID-19 vaccines than they need to immunize their entire population, a global movement campaigning to end extreme poverty and preventable disease said on Friday.
"With over half of current and projected production doses of COVID-19 vaccines monopolized by a small number of wealthy countries, large swaths of the global population will be left unprotected and the virus will be allowed to circulate, unchecked and mutating, for years to come," the ONE Campaign said.
According to the report, Australia, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States and the European Union have bought so many doses that they could inoculate their citizens and still have a surplus of one billion doses.
"These excess doses alone, for example, are sufficient to vaccinate the entire adult population of Africa," it said.
The chart showed that the United States, for example, purchased 1.
1 billion vaccine doses and only need around 656.4 million to administer the two-dose treatment to its 328.2 million population, while the UK's surplus amounts to 133.3 million doses.
The ONE Campaign report comes as the UK prime minister Boris Johnson is set to announce later on Friday that the UK will donate its surplus vaccine supply to poorer countries at a G7 virtual meeting.
"The good news is that G7 leaders have the chance to seize this opportunity. If they can agree to a fast, fair, and effective way to share excess doses with other countries as soon as they come off the production line, they could really supercharge the global fight against this virus," the ONE Campaign said.
On Wednesday, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described the global COVID-19 vaccine rollout as "wildly uneven and unfair," after pointing out that only 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations, while more than 130 have not received a single dose.