The COVID-19 pandemic is the most serious public health challenge the world has faced in the 21st century. It poses a serious threat to health systems around the world, and has highlighted the poor global coordination on health issues, inadequate investment in primary healthcare, and inequitable access to healthcare.
Since then little has changed. Writing in the
Telegraph on Monday Dr Tedros, alongside the heads of three other UN bodies, said a “two-track pandemic” was developing “with richer countries having access and poorer ones being left behind.”
“Inequitable vaccine distribution is not only leaving untold millions of people vulnerable to the virus, it is also allowing deadly variants to emerge and ricochet back across the world,” they wrote.
But are things as bad as they seem? And what can be done to vaccinate the world? The hurdles – and the solutions – can be split into three broad categories: making, buying and distributing the shots. Here, we take a look at each.
The other standout challenge is the obvious flaws in Australia’s hotel quarantine. Put bluntly, hotels are not fit for this use. They should always have been a temporary measure that as time and the pandemic wore on were replaced by purpose-built facilities. What is perplexing is that we have, for all to see, a much better model that has a record of doing a better job than hotels in containing the virus. Once a dormant mining camp on the outskirts of Darwin, the Howard Springs quarantine facility, which was run until earlier this month by the Commonwealth, is the gold standard in Australia.
Friday, 28 May 2021, 8:54 am
United Nations Secretary-General today called
on some of the world’s leading philanthropists and
business leaders to urgently help to ramp up critical global
efforts to ensure vaccine equity, and join the fight to end
the COVID-19 pandemic which has claimed and upended
countless lives and livelihoods over the last 18
months.
“We need global companies to mobilize on a
global scale to beat this pandemic,” said UN
Secretary-General António Guterres at a high-level virtual
roundtable hosted by the UN Verified
initiative, the IKEA Foundation and Purpose a social
impact agency that works with the United Nations on the
There is a need to rapidly increase vaccine supply to defeat the global pandemic. The U.S. government recently supported a proposal at the World Trade Organization .