BEIJING, Aug 6 (NNN-AGENCIES) — China will provide 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines for the world and offer 100 million U.S. dollars to COVAX throughout this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping said Thursday in a written message to the first meeting of the international forum on COVID-19 vaccine cooperation.
“China will continue to do our best to help developing countries cope with the pandemic,” Xi said, according to a Chinese foreign ministry statement.
At the Global Health Summit in May, Xi said China had provided 300 million doses of vaccines to more than 80 countries, US$2 billion in aid to developing countries’ pandemic countermeasures and economic recoveries. He also offered US$3 billion international aid in the next three years to developing countries.
The increasingly widening gap between inoculation rates in wealthy and poor countries widens is one of the top concerns of the World Health Organization (WHO).
High-income countries administered around 50 doses for every 100 people in May, and that number had since doubled, according to the WHO. Low-income countries have only been able to administer 1.5 doses for every 100 people, because of lack of supply.
As several rich countries have started or will start providing Covid-19 vaccine booster shots to fully vaccinated people to better protect them against the Delta variant, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on Wednesday called for a moratorium of these countries to delay the boosters until at least the end of September.
By doing so the vaccines could be redistributed and to enable at least 10 per cent of the population of every country to be vaccinated, Tedros said. — NNN-AGENCIES
