Not even the reality of a global pandemic that poses an equal threat to rich and poor has been able to banish the spectre of the weighted privilege linked to the rich/poor divide among nations.
Last week, World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Gebreyesus broke the United Nations’ silence over what, he says, is the skewed nature of the global COVID-19 vaccine distribution regime, bluntly describing the process as the “hoovering up” of the lion’s share of the COVID-19 vaccines by the wealthy countries. This, Gebreyesus said, may well have placed the international community on the brink of “a catastrophic moral failure.”
