WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st June, 2021) Coronavirus vaccines have yet to reach areas in Yemen controlled by Houthi rebels, who have dismissed the pandemic as an American conspiracy and suppressed information on the disease, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Tuesday.
"The deliberate decision of the Houthi authorities' to keep the real number of cases of COVID-19 under wraps and their opposition to vaccines are putting Yemeni lives at risk," HRW Deputy middle East Director Michael Page said in a press release. "Pretending Covid-19 does not exist is not a mitigation strategy and will only lead to mass suffering."
As of early 2021, the Houthi-controled Health Ministry in Sanaa, Yemen's capital, reported only one COVID-19-related death, four confirmed cases and two recoveries since the pandemic began, the release said.
Yet Doctors without Borders said in March that their teams in Yemen were seeing a drastic rise in the number of people seriously ill with COVID-19, the release added.
In the same month, Houthi leader Abdul Malik Al-Houthi dismissed the pandemic as an American conspiracy during a television interview, according to the release.
Yemen's internationally recognized government received 360,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 31 as the first batch, part of 1.9 million doses that the nation was due to receive in 2021 from the COVAX global distribution program, HRW said. Nevertheless, no vaccines have reached areas under Houthi control, it added.
