Covid vaccines: It's heartless and stupid not to immunise the world – Scotsman comment

As John Major spoke of the dangers to democracy in the UK, another former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, once again sounded the alarm over an issue that risks slipping out the public spotlight.

A health worker vaccinates a woman against Covid in Siaya, Kenya. But just 11 per cent of people in Africa have been immunised (Picture: Brian Ongoro/AFP via Getty Images)

Saying people had become “complacent” about Covid, Gordon Brown warned that global health funds were running out of money and poor countries were struggling to vaccinate their populations.

In the world’s rich nations, about 75 per cent of the population has been vaccinated, but in Africa, more than a year since the first vaccines were developed, the figure is just 11 per cent.

As has been said many times before, a virus does not respect national boundaries so it is the vaccination rate of all humanity that really matters.

Brown told an Oxfam podcast that rich countries content to vaccinate their own citizens were taking “a narrow view of national self-interest”, saying a “mutating crisis” could cost them trillions of pounds.

He also pointed out the humanitarian cost of the refusal to waive patents on vaccines so poor nations could produce their own supplies cheaply and save lives. “What's happened in Africa is as bad as what happened under colonial rule,” he added.

We like to think we are more enlightened than our ancestors in the days of Empire, but if we simply congratulate ourselves on vaccination rates in Scotland or the UK and pay little attention to the situation in the wider world, we are being not only reckless with our own health, but heartless to the suffering of fellow humans.

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