Stop hoarding coronavirus vaccines, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa tells rich nations

Name: SCMP Explains: What's the difference between the major Covid-19 vaccines?
Uploaded: 2021-01-26T13:05:19.000Z
Duration: 9 min 50 s
Description: SCMP Explains: What's the difference between the major Covid-19 vaccines?

South Africa has recorded some 1.4 million cases and 41,000 casualties, almost half the death toll of the whole continent

As African nations struggle to get enough vaccine doses, some countries have already acquired ‘up to four times’ what their population needs, Ramaphosa says

2-MIN READ2-MIN

Reuters

Published: 9:05pm, 26 Jan 2021Updated: 9:05pm, 26 Jan 2021

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday urged wealthy countries not to hoard surplus doses of Covid-19 vaccines, saying the world needed to come together to fight the pandemic.

South Africa has recorded nearly half the coronavirus deaths in Africa, and the continent as a whole is struggling to secure sufficient vaccines to start countrywide inoculation programmes for its 1.3 billion people.

“We need those who have hoarded the vaccines to release the vaccines so that other countries can have them,” Ramaphosa told a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum.

“The rich countries of the world went out and acquired large doses,” he said. “Some countries even acquired up to four times what their population needs … to the exclusion of other countries.”

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus last week described this unequal access as a “catastrophic moral failure”, urging countries and manufacturers to spread doses more fairly around the world.

09:50

SCMP Explains: What's the difference between the major Covid-19 vaccines?

Ramaphosa chairs the African Union, which this month secured 270 million shots for the continent to supplement 600 million doses coming from the Covax scheme co-led by the WHO.