(Reuters) -Group of Seven leaders are pledging to donate hundreds of millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccines to poor countries.
Following are the pledges so far:
UNITED STATES
U.S. President Joe Biden plans to buy and donate 500 million doses of the Pfizer Inc coronavirus vaccine to more than 90 countries. He has also called on the world’s democracies to do their part to help end the pandemic.
U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, will provide 200 million doses in 2021 and 300 million doses in the first half of 2022, which the United States will then distribute to 92 lower-income countries and the African Union.
UNITED KINGDOM
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that “the G7 will pledge to distribute vaccines to inoculate the world by the end of next year, with millions coming from surplus UK stocks.”
Britain says that G7 leaders are expected to agree to provide 1 billion doses via dose sharing and financing to end the pandemic in 2022.
Johnson has pledged to donate at least 100 million surplus coronavirus vaccine doses within the next year, including 5 million beginning in the coming weeks.
EUROPEAN UNION, GERMANY, FRANCE, ITALY
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has said the European Union aims to export 700 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to lower-income countries by the end of 2021. [L2N2NU0AJ]
France and Germany pledged to donate 30 million doses each, with Italy offered 15 million doses.
France has also said it has donated 184,000 doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to Senegal through the COVAX vaccine-sharing programme.
JAPAN
Japan has said it will donate about 30 million doses of vaccines produced within the country through COVAX.
Japan last week delivered to Taiwan 1.24 million doses of AstraZeneca’s vaccine for free.
CANADA
Reuters has reported that Canada is in talks to donate excess doses through COVAX, although it has not yet made public any firm commitment of donations, or said how much it plans to donate.
GLOBAL CONTEXT
COVAX, backed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), aims to secure 2 billion vaccine doses for lower-income countries by the end of 2021.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has said the pandemic is being perpetuated by a “scandalous inequity” in vaccine distribution.
Before the new pledges this week, some 150 million doses had been pledged to COVAX, far short of the 250 million needed by the end of September, and a target of 1 billion by year-end.
Over 2.2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine https://graphics.reuters.com/world-coronavirus-tracker-and-maps/vaccination-rollout-and-access have been administered worldwide, and around 560 million of those have been given in G7 countries alone.
The global population is estimated at around 7.8 billion people, about a quarter of whom are younger than 15. Most approved COVID-19 vaccines are two-dose shots.
(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge in Carbis Bay, England; Editing by Grant McCool and Peter Cooney)
