‘Wildly unfair’: UN boss says 10 nations used 75% of all vaccines

Al Jazeera Antonio Guterres urges wealthy nations to lead global effort to ensure people in every country get inoculated for COVID as soon as possible. The United Nations chief has sharply criticised the “wildly uneven and unfair” distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, pointing out that just 10 countries have administered 75 percent of all vaccinations. Addressing a high-level meeting of the UN Security Council on Wednesday, Antonio Guterres said 130 countries have not received a single dose of vaccine. First COVID-19 vaccines enter Gaza after Israel hold up Left out by EU, Balkan nations turn to Russia, China for vaccine COVAX to send millions of AstraZeneca shots to Latin America COVAX sets out plan for global distribution of 337m vaccines “At this critical moment, vaccine equity is the biggest moral test before the global community,” he said. Guterres called for an urgent Global Vaccination Plan to bring together those with the power to ensure fair vaccine distribution – scientists, vaccine producers and those who can fund the effort – to ensure all people in every nation get inoculated as soon as possible. The secretary-general further called on the world’s leading economic powers in the Group of 20 to establish an emergency task force that should have the capacity to bring together “the pharmaceutical companies and key industry and logistics actors”. Guterres said a meeting on Friday of the Group of Seven top industrialised nations “can create the momentum to mobilise the necessary financial resources”. Reporting from the UN headquarters, Al Jazeera’s diplomatic editor James Bays said there was a broad agreement over the potential future problems in the fight against the pandemic due to the uneven distribution of vaccines. “Rich countries are vaccinating people but many other parts of the world are not. You’re never going to get rid of COVID-19 if you have it spreading in some parts of the world and potentially mutating, and potentially in the future making vaccines not work,” Bays said. “Less than 1 percent of COVID-19 vaccines so far globally have been administered in the 32 countries currently facing the most severe humanitarian crises.”