(Washington Insider Magazine) -On Sunday and Monday the countries of the G20 convened in Rome to discuss plans for global vaccine distribution and how helpful it may be to provide support to impoverished countries.
The group is made up of wealthy countries including Britain, the USA, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Japan and often assigns itself a leadership role on global affairs that they can’t avoid.
With vaccination rates in most of the G20 countries far above the global average – although there is still a disparity between the member states (65% in the UK vs 28% in Brazil) – many leaders from countries outside the group have claimed the immorality of the inequality. The fact that some of the world’s wealthiest countries have begun discussing people getting a third ‘booster’ shot and children being given jabs despite inconclusive evidence has emphasized the lack of empathy coming from the leaders of those countries.
This havoc threatened by low vaccination rates in poorer countries has done little to move leaders such as Joe Biden and Boris Johnson but one concern the WHO keeps trying to draw attention to has had them rethinking.
The Health Minister of Italy Robert Speranza said “If we leave part of the world without vaccines we risk new variants which will hurt all of us”. This is the reason he deemed that “inequality is too high and is not sustainable”.
The new Pact of Rome as the G20 plan has been called is a statement of intent for powerful countries to start doing their part but is almost completely devoid of timelines, resource allocation and concrete plans. Apart from the political commitment of doing something about the devastating equality, the Pact is almost free from commitment of any economic or logistical substance.
Speranza had vague plans for how the plan would be carried out, saying “Transferring doses is not enough. We have to make other areas of the world capable of producing, sharing methodologies and procedures”.
The commitment among G20 countries to inoculating poorer countries so far varies massively. At the beginning of summer, China had exported over 250 million doses out of its 355 million total, more than the rest of the world combined. The US meanwhile had exported around 1% of the 330 million produced according to Statista.
