LONDON (Dispatches) – Former British prime minister Gordon Brown accused rich countries of committing a ‘moral outrage’ by stockpiling COVID-19 doses while poor countries are struggling to get supplies.
Brown, who is a United Nations special envoy, called on U.S. President Joe Biden and other Group of Seven leaders to urgently ship vaccines from warehouses in America and Europe to Africa.
Western countries are hoarding nearly 300 million shots while only 70 million people in Africa have so far been vaccinated, Brown said in an opinion piece published in the Sunday Mirror newspaper, citing research by data firm Airfinity.
By Christmas, the West is set to have 1 billion surplus doses even if every European and American adult has received a booster shot and all children over 12 are injected, he said.
“We are in a new ‘arms’ race – to get vaccines into people as quickly as possible – but this is an arms race where the West have a stranglehold on the vaccine supplies,” Brown said.
The grip of rich countries on vaccine stocks was stopping Covax, the international facility for buying vaccines, from meeting its promise to send 2 billion vaccines to poorer countries this year, he added.
The stockpiling has also delayed dose-sharing by G7 countries with Africa and low-income countries, Brown said.
The World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the rush by the wealthy countries to provide booster shots, comparing the move to providing “extra life jackets to people who already have life jackets, while we’re leaving other people to drown without a single life jacket.”
Separately, the director of the Oxford Vaccine Group, which has developed one of the COVID-19 jabs produced by AstraZeneca, denounced the current inequality in vaccine distribution as “a failure of the international community.”
Professor Andrew Pollard told FRANCE 24 that close to 80 percent of people in the European Union (EU) have received at least one dose of one of the COVID-19 vaccines.
But, the average for African countries is less than 8 percent, he pointed out. “About 10,000 people will die today because they didn’t have access to a vaccine,” he added.