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Amnesty International is calling on governments and companies in wealthier nations to ensure “equitable access to vaccines” in the fight against the Corona pandemic.
There is still “one Covid 19 death every 11 seconds – mostly in low-income countries,” Amnesty International International Secretary General Agnès Callamard stressed in a release from the human rights organization on Thursday.
Hardly any vaccines for low-income countries
Eighty-five percent of the vaccine doses were administered in high- and middle-income countries, according to Amnesty. Only 0.3 percent of doses were given in low-income countries, according to the vaccine tracker obtained by The New York Times. “Equitable access to vaccines is a basic human right. It should not depend on where a person lives,” Amnesty stressed.
At least four million people have died from Covid-19 worldwide so far, according to Johns Hopkins University. That tally is a “call to action for governments and companies in wealthier nations,” Amnesty stressed, adding, “How many more millions must die before the knowledge and technologies to produce enough vaccines for all are finally made widely available?”
Corona death toll remains high worldwide
Although many rich countries are in the process of announcing the lifting of Corona restrictions, the deadly effects of Covid-19 are still a reality, he said: “The death toll in Latin America remains high, while India and Nepal are facing deadly outbreaks and there are fears that health systems in Indonesia and southern Africa are on the verge of collapse.”
Acute vaccine shortages remain in many of these countries, he said, and can only be addressed by both “immediately sharing vaccine doses and removing barriers that prevent scaling up global production.”
Leaders, he said, must continue to advocate globally “for the temporary removal of intellectual property protection on life-saving products and encourage pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge and technologies.”
Most deaths in Brazil, Colombia and Russia
As of July 6, 2021, more than half of the population in 33 countries had received at least one vaccine dose, Amnesty said, citing figures from Our World In Data. All but three of those countries (Mongolia, Maldives, and Bhutan) were high-income countries, it said.
Compared with the week of Jan. 11, 2021, when the number of deaths worldwide topped two million, the number of people dying per week in those countries dropped from 51,614 to 4,015 – a 92-second drop, according to the World Health Organization. Globally, a total of 53,861 people are believed to have died from Covid-19 during the week of June 28, or one person every 11 seconds.
The ten countries with the most deaths last week were Brazil, India, Colombia, Russia, Argentina, Indonesia, the United States, Peru, Mexico and South Africa, he said.
— sources: APA and vienna.at/picture: pixabay.com
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