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LONDON (Reuters) – A vaccine summit hosted by US President Joe Biden this week is due to come up with a plan to transfer 100 million stored COVID-19 vaccines to poorer countries before they reach their expiration date expiration, said former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Biden is due to convene a virtual COVID-19 summit on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, aimed at boosting vaccinations around the world with the aim of ending the pandemic by the end of 2022.
Brown said he sent Biden and other G7 leaders research by Airfinity, a scientific information and analysis company, which found 100 million COVID-19 vaccines stored in wealthy countries of the northern hemisphere would expire by December without being used.
Of the 5.7 billion doses of coronavirus vaccines administered worldwide, only 2% were administered in Africa.
“We need a plan to get vaccines out quickly,” Brown, UK finance minister for a decade before becoming prime minister from 2007 to 2010, said in a statement.
“It will be a deep and collective political tragedy if this summit misses the opportunity to act with doses transferred immediately to the poorest countries,” he said.
Airfinity data predicts that without accelerating vaccine deployment, there will be 100 million more COVID-19 cases by next summer and one million more deaths from lack of ventilators and oxygen.
“It is unthinkable and inconceivable that 100 million vaccines must be thrown away from the stockpiles of rich countries while the people of the poorest countries of the world will pay for our vaccine waste in lives lost,” said Brown.
Brown called on leaders to decide whether countries should swap delivery contracts, how regulatory barriers to vaccine exports could be overcome, and who would bear the costs of using stored vaccines.
“No one is safe anywhere until everyone is safe everywhere. It is in everyone’s best interest, everywhere, that President Biden and his fellow G7 leaders do the right thing… to eradicate COVID from all corners of our globe, ”he said.
(Reporting by Kylie MacLellan; Editing by Edmund Blair)
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