There had always been a certain inevitability to the recent Global Alert issued by INTERPOL in the matter of the means by which countries acquire adequate supplies of the COVID-19 vaccines. Setting aside the well-worn expression – no tricks, no living – with which we in Guyana have become acutely familiar, it was the World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who, back in February, had delivered a resounding feral blast from Geneva over what he saw as a poignant demonstration of the global rich/poor divide in the approach to the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine. There was a certain embarrassingly undiplomatic bluntness to what the WHO top official had to say, not least his unmistakable assertion that the matter of the inequitable distribution of the vaccines was not a function of an absence of resources with which to acquire them, but rather, a function of what he considered to be a decidedly unwholesome application of leveraging by rich countries to ensure that their own supplies (and a bit more than they actually needed) were assured before giving consideration to supplying ‘the hungry half’ with even a modest allocation.
