A vaccine campaign has been rolled out on a massive scale in Europe, the United States, and other developed countries, while most of the low-income nations are waiting for similar initiatives or trying to secure vaccine via diplomatic means.
Despite the huge scale of vaccine coverage in rich countries, life will not return to normalcy if a vast majority of the global population remains out of immunisation process. The immunisation programmes for the bulk of population in most of the countries will continue until mid-2022 as experts predict.
Therefore, concerns over the task of vaccinating the populations of the poorer need a massive and collective global effort.
The World Health Organization (WHO) adopted COVAX, a global scheme to secure 6 billion doses of vaccine for countries, and the first 2 billion doses to be given this year, which hardly cover up to 20 percent of each country’s population. Even this is becoming difficult to secure in light of delays in production and large volumes of vaccines being booked by the wealthy nations.
For this, the State of Qatar repeatedly stressed the right of everyone to obtain a fair opportunity to get the vaccine to contain and eradicate the virus in a safe and effective manner, without any kind of discrimination and away from nationalism and ethnic affiliations.
Out of its awareness of the fact that confronting this pandemic is a collective responsibility, Qatar underlined the importance of spreading values of equality, cooperation and transparency in efforts to address the COVID-19 pandemic crisis by granting equal access to vaccine.
It is worth noting that the State of Qatar, since the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, took exemplary initiatives like providing urgent medical assistance to over 80 countries around the world and allocating $20m to support Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) and the COVAX mechanism.
Qatar sought to limit the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic since the beginning by providing various kinds of international aid to poor countries, reaffirming its commitment and keenness, to provide all medical services without any discrimination since the beginning of the spread of COVID-19.
During the public debate on the updated statement of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, at the Human Rights Council, Qatar’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Office in Geneva Ambassador Ali Khalfan Al Mansouri, reaffirmed Qatar’s firm standing to provide medical supports while stressing the importance of international efforts related to fair and equal access to vaccines by supporting the low-income nations to eradicate the virus from our world and restore normal life.
