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Vaccine inequality a moral outrage, WHO chief says

23 March 2021 16:45 (UTC +04:00)

The gap between the number of Covid-19 vaccines given in rich and poor countries is “becoming more grotesque every day”, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) says, APA reports citing BBC.

Research shows most vaccine doses globally have been bought by high-income countries, such as the US, Brazil and the UK.

High-income countries currently hold a confirmed 4.6 billion doses, while low-middle income nations have 670 million, according to research by the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.

"The inequitable distribution of vaccines is not just a moral outrage. It's also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating,” the WHO’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday.

Some models predict that it could be years before there are enough vaccines to cover the world's population.

But Thomas Cueni, head of an industry group for pharmaceutical companies, says the scaling up of vaccine production is on track thanks to partnerships among manufacturers in the developing and developed world.

In a statement, he says collaborations are “taking place on a massive scale”.