Poor countries need billions in aid to avert Covid catastrophe, experts warn
World leaders have been warned that unless they act with extreme urgency, the Covid-19 pandemic will overwhelm health services in many nations in South America, Asia, and Africa over the next few weeks.
Only billions of pounds of aid and massive exports of vaccines can halt a humanitarian catastrophe that is now unfolding rapidly across the planet, scientists and world health experts said.
They fear that the terrible scenes now unfolding in India – where people are dying in hospital corridors, on roads and in their homes, while car parks are being turned into cremation grounds – could be repeated in many other economically fragile nations. Their fates now contrast sharply with those of well vaccinated countries such as the UK and the US where lockdowns are being lifted.
A truly global Britain would not take aid away from some of the world s poorest people
The decision to stop funding valuable aid projects when the world is on its knees makes Britain look not only heartless, but brainless too
30 April 2021 • 12:53pm
The commitment to spend 0.7% of our national income on international development was always controversial, and aid expenditure in the U.K. has long been plagued by a reputation for ill thought out profligacy. But the era of the Ethiopian Spice Girls investment is long behind us, and after ten years of Conservative government leadership in Whitehall our international development expenditure had been reformed, streamlined, and was a vehicle for tremendous soft power among our allies in both the developing and developed countries of the world.
Evening Standard.
“So they are able to control the disease inside their borders, and obviously it is a very powerful state in China, but if you’re going to open the world back up again, then you have got to make sure the entire world is vaccinated.
“And the big risk is that you end up with countries – and this is because we work so much with African governments – my anxiety is that you’re going to have countries essentially kind of isolated from the world, because they don’t have the capacity to vaccinate their people.”
Mr Blair challenged the G7 – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US – to unite the world to get vaccinated within eight months and to set up a global Covid variant tracking system.