The Tyee has published my article Job One: Vaccinate the World. Excerpt:
According to Our World in Data, as of early August, Canada ranked fourth in the world in regard to the percentage of its people vaccinated. Only the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay and Chile are ahead of us. Worldwide, about 15 per cent of the globe’s people are fully vaccinated and 17 per cent are partly vaccinated.
But countries like Afghanistan, Sudan, Mozambique and Haiti have been unable to vaccinate more than a small fraction of their populations. COVID-19 variants still have some five billion people to infect globally — not to mention the vaccinated people they may be able to reinfect.
So while Canada and other rich nations define “success” as getting their own people vaccinated, COVID-19 thrives in the poor countries, spinning off variants that will eventually outwit our vaccines.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, head of the World Health Organization, has called out wealthy countries on this inequity. While he understands why sovereign nations want to take care of their own, Ghebreyesus says a shift in priorities is crucial in the fight against the coronavirus.
“We cannot accept countries that have already used most of the global supply of vaccines using even more of it, while the world’s most vulnerable people remain unprotected,” he said. “We need an urgent reversal, from the majority of vaccines going to high-income countries, to the majority going to low-income countries.”
