WTO summer holiday from vaccine-equity talks draws calls for action
WTO summer holiday from vaccine-equ.
An urgent global effort to rebalance the inequity between rich, vaccinated nations and poor nations sliding further into pandemic misery is colliding with an immovable calendar conflict: the European summer holiday.
Next week World Trade Organization delegates are planning to depart Geneva for their August break and, in doing so, pause their fractious debate over a proposal to waive intellectual-property protections for covid-19 shots until the second week of September.
Before they leave, members will adopt a report that acknowledges they ve made scant headway on the proposal aimed at making doses more widely available, which the world s top health expert says is critical to ending a moral failure.
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We’ve barely made a dent in vaccinating the world against COVID-19 Kat Eschner © Provided by Popular Science SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, still has a huge reservoir of unvaccinated or partially-vaccinated people to infect.
As COVID-19 vaccinations become more accessible in wealthy countries, most developing nations are still waiting for their first doses to arrive. Slow rates of global vaccinations could give the virus more time to mutate, experts say, and compound the economic and social crises already caused by the pandemic.
A number of issues prevent people around the world from getting vaccinated but two stand out: Only a small number of companies know how to manufacture the vaccines that have been approved for use (or will be soon) and only some parts of the world have the technology to produce vaccines of this kind. However, both of these issues could be overcome, and the U.S. could play a lead role.
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