Every now and again, Gordon Brown makes a decent point – as he does today, pointing out that 80 per cent of the jabs have gone to the 20 richest countries. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, World Health Organisation chief, warned in January that ‘even as vaccines bring hope to some, they become another brick in the wall of inequality between the world’s haves and have-nots.’ MPs rebel over cutting aid. But send vaccines to overseas pensioners, when they could be heading for the arms of British schoolchildren? Here, they fall silent. Ethically, it’s a far harder question.
When Covid vaccines were still a hypothetical, the moral dilemma was clear. Once a country has vaccinated its at-risk groups (ie, the over-50s) it would have massively downgraded the potency of Covid-19. Britain’s third wave, for example, infected just as many people as the second but with just a quarter of the hospitalisations and just 6 per cent of the deaths.
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