Vaccine Inequality: A New Beginning or Another Missed Opportunity?
Author:
Feb 23, 2021
Last year, four major opportunities to battle COVID-19 were missed. If vaccine inequality will prevail in the coming months, that would represent the fifth missed opportunity – with prohibitive human costs and economic damage.
Recently, I was virtually at the prestigious Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue (Vienna, Austria) and had a conversation with Ambassador Irene Giner-Reichl (for the video, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUcGG22B_YA ). The focus was on the missed opportunities and the future of the global pandemic future.
Recently, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres sharply criticized the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Addressing the Security Council, Guterres noted that just 10 countries have administered 75% of all vaccinations. Meanwhile, 130 countries had not received a single dose.