South African President Cyril Ramaphosa addresses the crowd gathered at Miki Yili Stadium ahead of the 25th anniversary celebrations of Freedom Day in Makhanda, Eastern Cape Province on April 27. 2019.
MICHELE SPATARI AFP | Getty Images
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday urged the world’s richest countries to stop “accumulating” vaccines and called for an end to “vaccine nationalism”.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Agenda virtual event, Ramaphosa warned that some countries had requested more vaccine supplies than they needed and that this was counterproductive to the global recovery effort.
“Ending the pandemic around the world will require greater collaboration in vaccine deployment, ensuring that no country lags behind in this effort,” he said.
“The richest countries in the world came out and acquired large doses of vaccines from the developers and manufacturers of these vaccines, and some countries have even gone further and acquired up to four times what their populations need,” he said. to say.
“This was aimed at hoarding these vaccines and is now being done to the exclusion of other countries in the world that need it most,” he added, urging major economies to release their surplus deposits to distribute. them in developing countries.
South Africa is the country most affected by Covid-19 on the continent, which has largely managed to avoid the kind of uncontrolled spread that stopped the US and much of Europe. As of Tuesday morning, the country had registered more than 1.4 million cases with 41,117 deaths.
At a roundtable as part of the Davos Agenda event on Tuesday morning, CDC director in Africa John Nkengasong said the continent is facing a “very aggressive second wave.” of the pandemic, with mortality rising by an average of 18% in the last 55 African member states a week.
“As a continent we need to recognize that vaccines won’t be here when we want them, but as such we need to really focus on the public health measures we know work,” he added.
Ramaphosa, who is also president of the African Union, praised the continent’s collaborations in Covid-19’s responses, including the African Medical Supplies Platform, which has offered assistance to national health systems, has established col · Regional collaboration and has deployed community health workers to support treatment trials and efforts.
He also praised the progress of the African vaccine acquisition task force, which he said was created when AU nations realized “how the richest countries in the world are behaving”.
The AVATT has secured some 270 million provisional doses directly for AU member states, in addition to the 600 million expected by the World Health Organization’s COVAX initiative.