Paris, Nov. 29 (EIRNS)—In May 2021, during a Paris summit on Africa, French President Emmanuel Macron, in a remarkable stroke of unusual wisdom, warned “that failing to vaccinate Africans risked allowing potentially dangerous Covid-19 variants to emerge on the continent that then could spread around the world.” And the French President even staked out an aim of vaccinating 40% of people in Africa by the end of 2021. Today, only 5 African countries—less than 10% of the continent’s 54 nations—will reach the year-end goal of fully vaccinating 40% of their populations, unless efforts are made to accelerate the pace, warned the World Health Organization (WHO) in late October.
Macron also said at that time: “We are asking the WHO, the WTO and the Medicines Patent Pool to remove all these constraints in terms of intellectual property which blocks the production of certain types of vaccines.” Both India and South Africa have formally made this request to the World Trade Organization (WTO). This week, U.S. President Joe Biden also called on countries attending a WTO meeting next week to waive intellectual property protections on coronavirus vaccines. Biden even declared that the new discovery of the Omicron variant demonstrates that the pandemic will not end until the entire world has equal access to vaccines.
