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Letters | Rich countries have a duty to do more to address vaccine inequality
- It is a blessing that the scientific world has pulled out all stops to develop vaccines to fight this scourge. Yet vaccination rates still vary widely across the world
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I am writing in response to your reports on vaccine inequality and how this is hurting Asia’s poor and the rest of the world.
The coronavirus, since first being reported in December 2019, has infected more than 187 million people worldwide and killed more than 4.05 million, according to the World Health Organization.
In the United States alone, 33.5 million people have been infected with more than 600,000 dead. India has reported 30.9 million cases and more than 410,000 deaths. In Brazil, 19 million people have caught the disease and more than 533,000 are dead as a result.
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This is a terrible disease and it is a blessing that the scientific world has pulled out all stops to develop the vaccines to fight this scourge. Yet vaccination rates still vary widely across the world.
In the two worst-hit countries in the world until recently, the US has managed to procure enough vaccines to inoculate 48.1 per cent of its population but India has managed just 5.5 per cent of its vast population of around 1.36 billion.
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The global spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19
The global spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of Covid-19
On the continent of Africa, many poor countries relying on the global vaccine-sharing scheme Covax Facility do not have enough doses to continue their vaccination programmes, the WHO said last month. Some countries are yet to receive any at all.
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