Le Matin – UN: advocacy in New York in favor of vaccine equality in the world

The President of the United Nations General Assembly, Abdulla Shahid, pleaded in New York on Tuesday in favor of vaccine equality to overcome the coronavirus pandemic and its variants. “Without vaccine equality, there will be no economic recovery or return to normal,” said Mr. Shahid, who was speaking at a press conference on the results of his 100 days at the head of the UN General Assembly. In this context, he called on the international community to bring together efforts to generalize vaccination in the world by 2022, noting that a high-level meeting will be organized on January 30 on vaccine equality with the aim of rallying the support from Member States. The World Health Organization (WHO) has set the goal of vaccinating 40% of the population of each country by the end of the current year and 70% by mid-2022. According to the WHO, only five African countries, or less than 10% of the continent’s 54 nations, will meet this target, unless efforts are made to speed up the pace of vaccination. According to the UN agency, 7.804 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered worldwide until November 25 and 3.2 billion people have been fully vaccinated, while 4.15 billion have received at least one dose.

For his part, the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, had called for a global vaccination plan to defeat the Covid-19 pandemic. “Only a global vaccination plan can end a global pandemic and an unjust situation,” he said at a ministerial meeting of the Group of 77 and China recently held in virtual mode. In the aftermath of the emergence of the new variant of the coronavirus, Omicron, several health experts have insisted on the need to scale up vaccination globally, believing that as long as large parts of the world will not benefit from any vaccine coverage, the entire planet will remain vulnerable.

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