“Rich Countries Secured 53% of Best Vaccines”, Fatima Bhutto
Israel, leading the world in vaccine rollout, is administering over 150,000 doses a day but purposefully not jabbing the Palestinian people
“Rich countries with 14% of the world’s population have secured 53% of the best vaccines”, maintained Fatima Bhutto, Pakistani writer, columnist, and former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s niece.
Fatima Bhutto in her recent article, published in The Guardian, asserted that almost all of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines will go to rich countries.
“The Moderna vaccine will go to rich countries exclusively, it is not even being offered to the poor”, she added.
As per columnist, nine out of 10 people in poor states may never be vaccinated at all as Washington grabbed it making sure no other state gets it.
“The European Union has exported 34m doses to, of all places, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong, countries that have no problem sourcing or paying for vaccines”, the article read.
Moderna’s chief executive didn’t feel ruth about the unvaccinated poor states as the company forecasted sales of over $18bn for 2021.
“Pfizer hasn’t done too badly either, they’re expecting a cool $15bn in sales”, Fatima claimed.
As mentioned in The Guardian, South Africa, the worst-hit country, is buying Oxford’s AstraZeneca vaccine at nearly two and a half times the per-unit price of European countries.
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According to AstraZeneca’s officials, the company capped the price per dose at €2.50, but European countries are buying doses below the cap and African countries far above it.
“Canada has bought enough doses to vaccinate every single Canadian five times over. But the entire continent of Africa, home to 1.3 billion people, has been allocated a total of 300m doses”, she wrote.
Israel, leading the world in vaccine rollout, is administering over 150,000 doses a day but purposefully not jabbing the Palestinian people.
“Israel had no legal obligation to vaccinate Palestinians”, she quoted Israeli officials.
However, the country is willing to gift the supplies of Moderna vaccine to countries that already had or decided to move their embassies to Jerusalem.
Meanwhile, China and Russia were practicing vaccine diplomacy and supplied more than 800m doses to 41 countries.
“Covid-19 has brought us new models: Vietnam, New Zealand, Iceland, Rwanda, smaller countries, striving countries, poorer countries, those countries protected their populations, they set protocols in motion, they saved lives”, Fatima Bhutto maintained.
