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Parliamentary reporter @TrinderMatt
A FAILURE to send unused Covid-19 vaccines from the West to the global South would be an act of “criminal” neglect, former prime minister Gordon Brown said today.
Mr Brown warned there had been a “lack of co-ordination” from Europe and the US in helping other countries get jabs into arms as quickly as possible.
The ex-Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath MP said that any waste would be peacetime’s “biggest public policy failure for years” and called for excess doses to be airlifted to places struggling to access them.
Mr Brown is pressing Prime Minister Boris Johnson is convene an emergency summit with US President Joe Biden, the European Commission’s Ursula von der Leyen and Canadian premier Justin Trudeau to reach agreement on transferring 1.1 billion vaccines to lower-income countries in the next few months.
It is estimated that only 5 per cent of people in the world’s 92 poorest countries have been jabbed, as opposed to the vast majority of populations in Western nations.
Speaking on Sky News, Mr Brown referred to reports that there are approximately 240 million doses sitting in Europe and the US that are unlikely to be used for some time.
“Many of them may go to waste — and that would be criminal — which could immediately be airlifted out to those countries where the level of vaccination is so low that not even the nurses and doctors are protected and certainly not the elderly and vulnerable.
“Boris Johnson promised at the G7 [summit in June] that he was going to vaccinate the whole world.
“But since then, so little has happened. So we’ve got to take action immediately to use these unused vaccines to save lives.”
Mr Brown, who stepped down as prime minister in 2010, claimed his initiative “could save 100,000 lives and prevent many of the one million Covid-induced deaths projected over the next few months” as the virus continues to rage across the planet.
While backing similar calls, campaign groups including Global Justice Now have repeatedly demanded that the British government and the European Union drop their opposition to vaccine patent waivers.
They argue that the game-changing move, backed by Mr Biden, would allow lower-income countries to produce their own jabs.
