Asserting that “no one is safe until everyone is safe,” 30 international veterans of the public health response to the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak and over 80 other experts this week urged the World Health Organization to “dramatically expand” Covid-19 vaccine access in developing nations.
“The emotional strain of watching people in rich countries get vaccinated while we, in the poor countries, helplessly watch our loved ones die, amounts to an injustice that must come to an end now.”
—Zacharia Kafuko
The Ebola response veterans and health experts are calling on the World Health Assembly, the WHO’s decision-making body, to vote in its upcoming annual meeting on proposals that would greatly increase access to Covid-19 vaccines in the Global South. Due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the WHA meeting will be held virtually this year, from May 24 to June 1.
The advocates’ demand came in a letter to WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus organized by Mosoka Fallah, founder of Refuge Place International, a Liberian nonprofit recognized internationally for its heroic work during the 2014 Ebola epidemic that killed over 11,000 people—almost all of them in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea—over a two-year period. More than 500 healthcare professionals died during the outbreak.
Noting that “the Covid-19 pandemic has claimed more than two million lives worldwide,” the letter asserts:
“As we learned through the Ebola pandemic, poverty and geography should not be the determinants of access to life-saving vaccines,” the letter states. “Vaccines should be available to those who most immediately need them, with an emphasis on the ability to save lives.”
“If we don’t have global vaccine access for Covid-19, billions of lives in [low- and medium-income countries] continue to be at risk, and hundreds of thousands could be lost in the coming months,” it adds.
The letter’s signatories ask the WHO to schedule a WHA vote on the following proposals:
- That each country endorses the necessity and ethical urgency of supporting the goals and means of the WHO’s Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) program.
- That each country endorse the following ethical standard: All countries that ordered more doses than they can use should immediately commit to donate excess doses to COVAX or directly to those countries most in need. G20 countries and all countries above $11,200 GDP per capita should contribute 10% of their total expenditure on vaccines to the COVAX facility to help in purchasing doses for people in low- and medium-income countries.
- That all pharmaceutical companies should either use a multi-tiered vaccine pricing for low- and medium-income countries or waive their patent protection for such countries that have manufacturing capacity, and commit to supporting the tech transfer for such manufacturing.
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