Brussels, Jun 28 (IANS): Providing every country with equal access to vaccines can help vaccinate everyone and help the world beat the Covid pandemic as well as spur growth in the global economy, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Monday.
"If we keep the huge inequality between developed countries and developing countries in the recovery projects, we might have a collapse of many aspects of the global economy,"Guterres was quoted as saying to Euronews.
"On the contrary, if you are able to vaccinate everybody everywhere and you defeat the virus and at the same time address the problems of debt of liquidity of developing countries and guarantee that developing countries can also recover from the pandemic, we might have a breakthrough," he added.
He also asserted the need to double vaccination production capacity to ensure an equitable distribution of vaccines.
Many poorer countries lack Covid-19 vaccine doses to continue with their inoculation programmes, the World Health Organization (WHO) said last week.
WHO senior adviser Dr Bruce Aylward said the COVAX programme -- the international vaccine-sharing initiative -- had delivered 90 million doses to 131 countries, but it is nowhere near enough to protect populations from the deadly virus, the BBC reported.
Of the 80 low-income countries involved in COVAX, "at least half of them do not have sufficient vaccines to be able to sustain their programmes right now", Aylward said, at a WHO briefing in Geneva, last week.
Led by the WHO and other international organisations, COVAX initially set a target of providing two billion doses worldwide by the end of 2021.
However, the distribution of these vaccines has been hampered by manufacturing delays and supply disruptions, leading to shortages in countries wholly reliant on COVAX, the BBC reported.
Early this month, the Group of Seven(G7) countries -- Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US -- also pledged to donate one billion doses of Covid-19 vaccines to poor countries to help vaccinate the world by the end of next year.
Of the 100 million Covid doses, 80 million will go to the COVAX programme 20 million will be shared bilaterally with countries in need.