The next year is going to be “humanitarian catastrophe” and there is a risk of poor countries being “trampled” as rich countries roll out COVID-19 vaccines, top UN officials told the 193-member UN General Assembly recently. World Food Programme (WFP) chief David Beasley and World Health Organization (WHO) head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke during a special meeting on COVID-19, which emerged in China late last year and has so far infected 65 million globally.
“2021 is literally going to be catastrophic based on what we’re seeing at this stage of the game,” David Beasley said, news agency Reuters reported. 2021 was likely to be “the worst humanitarian crisis year since the beginning of the United Nations” 75 years ago, Beasley said. “We are not going to be able to fund everything, so we have to prioritise, as I say, the icebergs in front of the Titanic,” Beasley said. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who also spoke at the virtual UN summit on the coronavirus pandemic, said the world was seeing “light at the end of the tunnel” in the nearly year-long Covid crisis, according to the news agency.
Beasley said it is not simply the pandemic which has led to this catastrophic situation. While the pandemic and the government-regulated lockdowns have brought a steep decline in human progress, the “man-made conflict”, too, has played a major role in this situation, especially in countries such as Syria, Yemen, and South Sudan. “We’ve got to end some of these wars. We’ve got to bring these wars to an end, so we can achieve the sustainable development goals that we so desire,” he said. Explaining the situation with the metaphor of Titanic, he continued, “If we’re strategic and put the funds to these particular icebergs before us, I believe that we can get through 2021, while we work with the vaccines and rebuild the economies.”
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and his top officials have also called for COVID-19 vaccines to be made available to all and for rich countries to help developing countries combat and recover from the pandemic. Tedros appealed for an immediate injection of US$4.3 billion into a world vaccine-sharing program. “We simply cannot accept a world in which the poor and marginalized are trampled by the rich and powerful in the stampede for vaccines,” Tedros told the General Assembly. “This is a global crisis and the solutions must be shared equitably as global public goods.”
