“While vaccines have been pledged for donation from all donors, we are not getting the vaccines into people's arms and urgently need a month-to-month timetable to meet our interim targets and prevent further loss of lives. An immediate emergency airlift of 240m vaccines this month from the global north to the global south should be followed by the transfer of a further 760m vaccines transferred by February. This would be the biggest peacetime public policy decision, which could save 100,000 lives and prevent many of the one million Covid-induced deaths projected over the next year. Vital time to contain Covid, stop mutations and save lives is being wasted. It needs our political leaders to step up to the sign-off. Every passing day is a day lost in the battle to contain Covid and save lives. As long as health workers remain unvaccinated and the vulnerable elderly have no protection against Covid-19, deaths in the poorest countries will rise, and there the disease threatens to spread uninhibited in unprotected environments, giving rise to new variants that could eventually infect even the fully vaccinated.”

by: Gordon Brown