The UAE (Dubai) Minister of State for Advanced Technology, Sarah Al Amiri, on Monday, 11 April said that the COVID-19 pandemic was “far from over” and also called for faster action in getting vaccine shots to poor and war-torn countries.
Al Amiri told the United Nations Security Council that just around a tenth of people in strife-ridden countries have received their COVID vaccinations, and in some areas, less than 1% of the population had been vaccinated.
At the talks that Britain, UAE and France co-hosted, she said, “New waves, connected with new variants, are proof that no one is safe until everyone is safe.”
Spokespeople warned of coronavirus hitting again and the lack of deliveries of vaccines to nations that require the most, like Ukraine and Yemen, where a Russian invasion has forced thousands of people to escape from their homes.
Ms Al Amiri further stated, “The pandemic’s ongoing security legacy will likely worsen the root causes of these challenges worldwide, and a solution is necessary to avoid far-reaching ripple effects from this COVID outbreak.”
Girls and Women are “still handling the brunt” of the COVID situation, and the “proper and equal distribution of vaccines is both a strategic investment as well as a moral obligation”, she stated.
On Monday, the World Health Organisation of UN warned that 20 African countries are still getting limited access to vaccinations, and not even 10% of the population there has been vaccinated against the Corona pandemic.
The scheme of Covax, which has been created to assure the world’s poorest 92 countries had access to COVID vaccines, has sent 1.42 billion vaccine shots to 145 territories, said the UN.
The scheme has got enough doses available for all those countries to get the WHO’sWHO’s 70% coverage target by the end of June, said the agency’s experts.
Till now, the WHO has approved eight Covid-19 vaccines and versions of them made by Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Janssen, Sinovac, Sinopharm, Moderna, Bharat Biotech and Novavax.