The world should deliver millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines to North Korea, where “draconian” anti-pandemic measures are worsening a severe food crisis, a UN human rights expert said on Wednesday.
The impoverished nation has been under a self-imposed lockdown to protect itself from covid since early 2020, which has crippled the economy and paralyzed trade.
The “draconian” measures against covid, which include a closure of borders and limitations on the movement of people, have worsened the food crisis, said Argentine Tomás Ojea Quintana, the UN special rapporteur for human rights for the country.
The expert noted that foreign humanitarian workers were forced to leave the country, thus paralyzing these operations, leaving vulnerable populations at risk of famine.
The international community should “agree on a strategy” to deliver to the People’s Republic of Korea “60 million doses to cover at least two injections for the entire population,” Quintana told a news conference in Seoul on Wednesday.
Vaccines “are the key to opening the border” of North Korea and “getting it out of isolation,” the rapporteur said.
North Korea has not yet confirmed any cases of the new coronavirus.
According to the World Health Organization, until the end of 2020 the country carried out 13,259 covid tests and all of them returned a negative result.
Last year, North Korea was due to receive more than 1.7 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine through the Covax global distribution mechanism, but turned them down over fears of side effects, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported at the time.
The country has also rejected offers from allied countries such as Russia and China, according to media reports.
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