“The scientific community has warned the international community on several occasions about the risks of very new variants in places where there is a very low rate of vaccinations,” Francesco Rocca, the president of the International Federation of Red Cross (IFRC) and Red Crescent Societies, told reporters in an interview in Moscow.
About 65 percent of people in high-income countries have had at least one dose of vaccine against COVID-19, but just over 7 percent in low-income countries, UN data show.
Western countries have been accused of hoarding vaccines and the WHO has urged them to avoid a rush to give out booster shots when millions worldwide have yet to receive a single dose.
Photo: AFP
“This is a selfish approach coming from the Western community, this is really a blind approach,” Rocca said. “It’s unbelievable that we are still not realizing how much we are interconnected. This is why I call the Omicron variant the ultimate evidence.”
The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 was first reported in South Africa on Nov. 24 and is now known to be present in more than two dozen countries.
It has sparked a wave of travel bans, cast the global economic recovery into doubt and led to warnings that it could cause more than half of Europe’s COVID-19 cases in the next few months.
“It is essential and vital to identify new solutions, to find an end to the pandemic, and the only way is to vaccinate, so access for everyone, everwhere,” Rocca said.
One option is suspending intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines to boost production, he said.
The idea has met with fierce opposition from pharmaceutical giants and their host countries, which say that patents are not the main roadblocks to scaling up production and warn the move could hamper innovation.
“It’s a moral imperative. I’m not naive. I know that there are the pharmaceutical companies that are protecting their patents,” Rocca said. “The other side of the coin is that governments invested billions ... in research. So I think it is immoral what is happening around the patents.”
The IFRC, one of the world’s largest humanitarian networks, supports local Red Cross and Red Crescent activities in 192 countries.
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