‘Covid will come back to haunt the west unless Africa is vaccinated’

Gordon Brown said hundreds of millions of vaccine doses are lying in warehouses in Europe and North America.

STV News

5th Sep 2021

Coronavirus will come back to haunt the west unless vaccination rates in Africa are improved, former prime minister Gordon Brown has said.

Brown said hundreds of millions of doses are lying in warehouses in Europe and North America when they could be used in African countries.

Writing in the Sunday Mirror, he said there will be about 500 million unused vaccines by the end of October.

He said world leaders like Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron should work to redirect vaccine supplies to those who need them most.

The former prime minister also discussed the issue on Sky’s Trevor Phillips on Sunday.

He said: “Seventy percent of the west has been vaccinated, only 2% in Africa and the other low-income countries of the world. So, 98% are unprotected.

“It’s bad for them, it’s bad for us, because the disease will come back to haunt us from Africa and hurt even the fully vaccinated here with new variants.”

He said western countries had enough supplies to vaccinate over-12s and carry out booster shot programmes as well as supply countries with low vaccination rates.

Calling for an urgent G7 meeting to address global vaccination, he said: “You’ll find African leaders will be demanding it too.

“Faith and church leaders know that this vaccine divide between vaccine-rich and vaccine-poor is really a terrible stain.

“It’s a moral failure on the part of the whole of the world.”