Six leaders of Latin American and Caribbean countries on Monday asked the international community for equitable access to vaccines against Covid-19, and demanded that the nations that have the most doses, that they can share them. “We make a vehement call to those countries that have excess doses or that have already vaccinated their population at risk, to implement measures so that these surpluses are distributed equitably and immediately,” says the statement released by the president from Costa Rica, Carlos Alvarado. Alberto Fernández, president of Argentina; Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico; Andrew Michael Holness, Prime Minister of Jamaica; Luis Alberto Arce Catacora, President of Bolivia; Guillermo Lasso Mendoza, president of Ecuador, and Luis Alberto Lacalle Pou, president of Uruguay According to the rulers, of the 1.3 billion doses of vaccines that have been administered globally, more than half were used in five countries that concentrate 50% of global GDP. “In total, low-income countries have received only 0.3% of world doses,” they denounced. The six leaders join a similar request made by the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and the Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), António Guterres. No one will be safe until we are all safe. Facing and recovering from the pandemic will only be possible when vaccines reach at-risk populations around the world, “they stated in the letter, signed together.”The new and more dangerous variants of the COVID-19 virus show that isolated vaccination by country is an ineffective strategy to end the acute stage of the pandemic,” they added. Five countries in Latin America are among the top 10 in the world with more cases of the disease detected per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 14 days: Uruguay, Argentina, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Colombia, according to data compiled by AFP.
