In the face of the existing inequality in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in the world, the Executive Secretary of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – People’s Trade Treaty (ALBA-TCP), Sacha Llorenti, stressed that the regional integration organization promotes an alternative model to neoliberalism amid the global sanitary crisis.
In this regard, Llorenti recalled that ALBA-TCP “has two major milestones in its creation as a regional bloc. Firstly, it was born to build a continental alternative to neoliberalism in 2004. Secondly, now, from the Global South, it is building an unprecedented response to the COVID-19 crisis and the crisis of multilateralism.”
0.1% of COVID-19 vaccines administered in the world have been allocated to low-income countries, while 86% of them have been distributed to upper-middle income and high-income countries, complained Llorenti.
The diplomat pointed out that “the pandemic has dramatically revealed how the world is organized under the logic of giving precedence to capital, not to people.”
Inequality in the distribution of vaccines is immoral, cruel and criminal, said Llorenti. “How many lives are lost and will be lost in the following weeks?” he asked.
He reaffirmed that ALBA-TCP is building a different model as an alternative based on solidarity and complementarity, and recalled the creation of “a humanitarian fund for the acquisition of vaccines” and “a bank of vaccines that will later prevent everyone from being left behind.”
The World Health Organization (WHO) recently said that inequality in the access to vaccines is growing more evident every day, and reproached that developed countries, which have hoarded most of them, do little to reverse the situation.
After over a year of pandemic and nearly four months after Europe started to authorize the first COVID-19 vaccines, the greatest difficulty to put an end to the sanitary emergency in the world centers on inequality to get the vaccines.
As this trend continues, the number of deaths and cases are on the increase. Over 2.8 million people have died from COVID-19, and the number of cases exceeds 130 million worldwide according to the most recent update of the Johns Hopkins University.