The World Health Organization warned Monday that wealthy nations are hoarding COVID-19 vaccines at the expense of the world’s poor, leaving millions of elderly people vulnerable even as younger, healthy people in richer nations get vaccinated. WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, spoke Monday from Geneva, one year after the first cases of COVID-19 were detected outside of China.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: “I need to be blunt: The world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure, and the price of this failure will be paid with lives and livelihoods in the world’s poorest countries.”
Dr. Tedros warned wealthy countries are circumventing the U.N.’s program to ensure the fair distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, known as COVAX, driving up prices and jumping to the front of the line. This comes as worldwide confirmed coronavirus cases topped 24 million — with over 2 million documented deaths from COVID-19.