Cape Town’s Archbishop Thabo Makgoba has condemned “vaccine apartheid”, saying that “the poor and the marginalised must be vaccinated at the same rate as those in developed countries”.
According to IOL, Makgoba made the call during his Easter sermon at St George’s Cathedral on Sunday.
Debates have been raging over “vaccine apartheid” and “vaccine inequality”, with some countries well-stocked, and others not.
“The voluntary vaccine supply mechanism, such as Covax, and the bilateral agreements used to procure vaccines across the world, are failing.
“And they are failing especially for the Global South, where we can with justification, say that the poor of the world are suffering from vaccine apartheid,” he said.
According to UNAIDS, nine out of 10 people living in the poorest countries are set to miss out on a vaccine this year.
“Unjustifiably, high prices block access and threaten to push more countries into an ever-deeper debt crisis. If we continue to pursue the vaccine model we have, we will fail to get this pandemic under control for years to come,” said UNAIDS’s Winnie Byanyima.
Last week, Western Cape Premier Alan Winde called on countries that ordered more COVID-19 vaccines than they needed to send them to South Africa.
“If you have excess, we are very interested. We put our hand up,” News24 quoted Winde as saying.
PICTURE: Cape Town etc gallery
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