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Add to Preferred SourcesThe teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has donated 100,000 Euros to boost global efforts to deliver COVID-19 vaccines to anyone, anywhere, who needs them, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced.
The contribution from her foundation to the WHO Foundation will support the COVAX Facility to provide vaccines to people in need and comes as cases worldwide rose for an eighth consecutive week.
About 1 in 4 people in high-income countries have received a COVID-19 vaccine, compared with just 1 in more than 500 in low-income countries.
My foundation will donate €100000 to support COVAX to ensure a more equitable global COVID-19 vaccine distribution. #VaccineEquity pic.twitter.com/JKxZC4s8F7— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) April 19, 2021
Speaking during WHO’s regular media briefing from Geneva, she urged the international community to address the “tragedy” of vaccine inequity, describing COVAX as the best path forward to ensuring equal distribution of these medicines and the way out of the global crisis.
Ms. Thunberg underscored the links between the pandemic and the climate emergency.
“Science shows that in the future, we will most likely experience more frequent and more devastating pandemics unless we drastically change our ways and the way treat nature,” she said.
“We can no longer separate the health crisis from the ecological crisis, and we cannot separate the ecological crisis from the climate crisis. It’s all interlinked in many ways.”
Step up your game
While the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines has shown what countries can achieve when they invest in science, Ms. Thunberg noted that most doses have gone to higher-income nations.
The Swedish teenager found it “completely unethical” that wealthier nations were now vaccinating younger, healthy citizens “if that happens at the expense of people in risk groups and on the frontlines in low and middle-income countries.”
Vaccine equity is “a moral test”, she said.
Increase in cases, deaths
New cases of COVID-19 increased for the eighth week in a row last week, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told journalists. The more than 5.2 million cases reported worldwide represent the most in a single week so far. Deaths also rose for the fifth straight week, totaling more than three million.
“It took 9 months to reach 1 million deaths; 4 months to reach 2 million, and 3 months to reach 3 million. Big numbers can make us numb. But each one of these deaths is a tragedy for families, communities and nations,” Tedros said.
Infections and hospitalizations among people aged 25 to 29 are increasing at an alarming rate, Tedros added, which is possiblly due to highly transmissible COVID-19 variants and increased socializing.