Save the Children on Monday voiced its disappointment at the outcome of the Group of Seven summit held over the weekend at a seaside luxury hotel in the English county of Cornwall, claiming it was a missed opportunity to help the world recover from the COVID-19 pandemic
LONDON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 14th June, 2021) Save the Children on Monday voiced its disappointment at the outcome of the Group of Seven summit held over the weekend at a seaside luxury hotel in the English county of Cornwall, claiming it was a missed opportunity to help the world recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
"This was supposed to be the first major summit of the recovery and it wasnt. We are incredibly disappointed about what has been offered for vaccinating the world and whats been offered to get every child safely back into school," the non-governmental organization's executive director of Policy, Advocacy and Campaigns, Kirsty McNeill, said in a video posted on Twitter.
Over three days of in-person discussion at the Carbis Bay hotel, the G7 leaders set out their agenda for post-coronavirus economic recovery, combating climate change, and tackling a range of foreign policy issues.
They pledged to donate 1 billion COVID-19 vaccine doses to poor countries either directly or through the World Health Organization-led COVAX Facility by 2022, to double down on goals to reach carbon net-zero emissions by 2050 and fund female education.
The Save the Children campaigner said, however, that the vaccine offer will come "one year too late" as the 1 billion doses are needed for this summer.
She said that the NGO had also asked the G7 to share vaccine patents so that countries can manufacture their own vaccines and pay for the pandemic recovery, but those requests were also ignored.
"They are after all the richest countries in the world and we asked them to "share the bill" on behalf of the poorest countries in the world. But so far, we ve seen no new money," McNeill said.
According to the activist, the decision to slash foreign aid prevented the UK government from rallying the rest of the G7 behind a financing plan that would get every child safely back into school.
Former UK prime minister Gordon Brown also criticized on Monday the outcome of the summit, calling it a failure, in an opinion column for The Guardian.
"The gift of 1bn doses from the richest countries to the poorest is headline-grabbing and welcome. But it falls billions of doses short of a solution and does not answer what Johnson called "the greatest challenge of the postwar era," Gordon wrote.
After stressing that at least 11 billion vaccine doses are needed to guarantee all countries the same level of COVID-19 protection as the West, the former Labour prime minister recalled that according to UNICEF, on current trends, such target won't be achieved before 2024.
"It is an undeniable fact that all of us will live in fear until no one lives in fear. So providing the vaccines is not just an act of charity: it is a form of self-protection, perhaps the best insurance policy in the world," Gordon said.
G7 is made up of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. The summit in Cornwall was also attended by the leaders of the European Union and several guest nations, such as South Korea and South Africa.
