By Valentine Amanze, Online Editor
The World Trade Organization (WTO) Director General, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, has appealed to developed nations to speed up production of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine in developing countries.
The WTO chief made the appeal on Tuesday, while responding to calls by members of the global trade watchdog to hold urgent talks with manufacturers to do so.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigerian former finance minister, who was until recently chair of the board of global vaccine alliance, GAVI, took on the top job at the global trade watchdog last week.
She had promised that health and vaccine access would be a top priority.
“The fact is that each additional day the vaccine shortage continues, people will pay with their lives,” Okonjo-Iweala said at a two-day summit focused on COVID-19 vaccine production, adding that around 130 countries were still waiting for vaccines.
She added that new vaccine manufacturing sites could be prepared in six to seven months or less than half the time previously thought.
In a sign that her ideas are gaining traction, seven of the body’s 164 members released a document on Tuesday urging her to hold urgent talks with COVID-19 vaccine developers and manufacturers on boosting production.
The WTO chief has few executive powers and members’ support is essential.
“… The WTO should rapidly make use of its resources to the full extent to foster a prompt, pragmatic and tangible acceleration in the global response to COVID-19, and particularly the global distribution of COVID-19 vaccines,” said the document co-sponsored by Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, New Zealand, Norway and Turkey.
Besides, WTO members are also due to discuss a possible waiver for intellectual property rights for COVID-19 drugs on Wednesday [today] that could allow producers in more countries to begin manufacturing shots.
However, talks are currently deadlocked with several wealthy countries opposing the waiver, saying it would undermine the expensive research that allowed the production of COVID-19 vaccines in the first place, according to Reuters.
Okonjo-Iweala also said that pandemic-related export restrictions had fallen in recent months, while urging countries to drop or reduce the remaining ones or set timelines for their phase-out to help minimise problems in the vaccine supply chain.
The COVAX vaccine-sharing programme, created to provide vaccines for poor and middle-income countries and backed by the GAVI alliance and the World Health Organisation (WHO), late in February began rolling out delivery of doses to African countries. It said earlier this month that it would deliver 237 millions doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccination to 142 countries by the end of May.