President Cyril Ramaphosa has thanked US President Joe Biden for his country’s donation of some 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines as “an important milestone in supporting the global community’s response to the pandemic.”
Speaking on Wednesday night during his participation in the virtual Global Covid-19 Summit on ending the pandemic, Ramaphosa cautioned that the gulf was widening between better-resourced nations and the rest of the global community and accused the West of hoarding vaccines.
Biden announced at the UN that his country would donate a second batch of 500,000 doses of vaccines now, and a second half billion doses of vaccines next year.
This is after a long campaign by South Africa and other countries that the resource-rich nations to stop hoarding the drugs and share them with the have-nots.
“I applaud you, President Biden, for the generosity that has been demonstrated by the United States under your leadership by donating millions of vaccines to several countries around the world to help us cope with this pandemic,” Ramaphosa said.
He warned that the gap between the rich and the poor continued to widen during the pandemic, with Africa vaccinating only 2% percent of its 1.2-billion people.
“The gulf is widening between better-resourced nations who are buying up — and even hoarding vaccines — and developing countries who are struggling to have access to vaccines,” Ramaphosa said.
He said the pandemic has “revealed the full extent of the vaccine gap between developed and developing economies, and how that gap can severely undermine global health security of around 66 billion vaccine doses administered worldwide.”
NM/jn/APA