CHARITY begins at home but it doesn’t end there.
Boris Johnson told his fellow G7 leaders there was “no point” in vaccinating national populations if efforts were not made to ensure the “whole word” got vaccines.
“We’ve got to make sure the whole world is vaccinated because this is a global pandemic and it’s no use one country being far ahead of another, we’ve got to move together,” he declared.
The virtual summit’s joint statement spoke of making 2021 a “turning point for multilateralism” with greater co-operation on the creation and deployment of vaccines across the globe as well as support for “affordable and equitable access to vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics, reflecting the role of extensive immunisation as a global public good”.
Indeed, the G7 leaders put money where their collective mouth was and increased the funding to Covax, the UN-led authority on providing vaccines to poorer countries, by more than doubling it to $7.5 billion.
Earlier, the Prime Minister pledged that most of the UK’s surplus vaccines would go to poorer countries to help them vaccinate their people.
But James Cleverley, the Foreign Office Minister, said it was “difficult to say with any kind of certainty” when Britain would start to hand out excess jabs, with the country’s own vaccine rollout programme still in full flow.
Commenting on the French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for the EU and US to urgently donate up to 5% of their vaccines to poorer nations, Mr Cleverly noted that, when the time came, the UK would be "looking at a figure significantly greater than that".
The UK has ordered more than 400 million doses of various vaccines, which will mean many will be left over once all the country’s adults are inoculated against coronavirus, probably by September.
The Government has made clear that it would hand over the surplus supplies to Covax, having already given £548m to it.
But even if the Covax plan works, it's only designed to cover 20% of each nation's population, which is well short of the so-called “herd immunity” expected to be achieved in the richer nations.
At present, worryingly, an estimated 130 countries have not yet begun any vaccinations whatsoever.
New figures from the anti-poverty pressure group, the One Campaign, suggest Australia, Canada, the EU, Japan, the UK, and the US have together secured more than 3 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines; that is said to be 1.2bn more than they need to give their entire populations two doses.
"The virus won't wait on us to be ready before it mutates, so we need to get these vaccines around the world as quickly as possible," said Romilly Greenhill, its UK Director.
While Britain can take comfort in the speed and scale of its national roll-out, it may count for little or nothing if poorer countries have to wait months or even years before they can get vaccines to protect their citizens from the ravages of Covid-19.
By which time, the coronavirus may well have mutated into a variant that evades our defences and reinfects us all over again. It really is the case that we are all in, and hopefully out, of this together.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel