IMF urged richer countries to pay for immunization of the poorest

The Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, said on Sunday at the G7 summit that rich countries and pharmaceutical companies must “pay” for coronavirus vaccination programs in developing countries.

Georgieva, who spoke in plenary at the Cornwall meeting on Saturday and will do so again today on the last day of the meeting, appeared in a meeting with reporters “impressed by the seriousness with which (G7 leaders) the question of ending the pandemic in the world ”.

The leaders of some of the most developed democracies on the planet have expressed “clear recognition” that helping developing countries fight the coronavirus “is not only a moral imperative, but a necessary step to sustain economic recovery”. “For this reason, we have to make sure that the world makes rich countries and corporations pay,” he said.

The Managing Director of the IMF stressed that the most urgent measure to be taken is to organize the donation of “surplus vaccines” to the poorest countries.

In this domain, the G7 discusses in Cornwall the goal of delivering 1 billion doses in the next year. The United States has already pledged a donation of $ 500 million and the United Kingdom an additional $ 100 million.

At the same time, stressed Georgieva, it is essential to start working to “expand the production capacity” of vaccines in developing countries.

If large areas of the planet remain unimmunized, new variants of the virus could spread to various parts of the world that would jeopardize the most advanced vaccination programs and also require the manufacture of new preparations adapted to these mutations, a- he warned.

Georgieva, stressed the need to help developing countries overcome the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus, warning of the risk of “dangerously divergent recoveries”. “We cannot allow the world to divide in two,” he stressed.

She agreed with her in this area with World Bank President David Malpass, who gave a press conference ahead of his participation in today’s G7 session. “Vaccination efforts will need to be sustained until 2022, and possibly beyond, so there is a need to increase manufacturing capacity,” said Malpass.

“It is also very important that research and development continue, because viral variants will be a problem in 2022”, he warned at the same time.

Malpass explained that one of the programs the World Bank is working on is creating a database that facilitates the donation of vaccines to developing countries.

“We need to be able to link excess production to countries that can use that particular type of vaccine in time, before it expires. This is one of the big challenges, ”he said.

The “Carbis Bay Declaration”, described by Downing Street as “historic”, included a series of commitments to prevent another health disaster. Among them is reduce the development time of vaccines, treatments and diagnostics, strengthen health surveillance and reform the World Health Organization (WHO) to make it stronger. “I am proud that for the first time today the world’s leading democracies are united to ensure that we are never again caught off guard” in the face of a major health crisis, said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

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