The Telegraph highlights ICN’s call for action on international vaccine inequality

ICN Chief Executive Officer Howard Catton has said the world has “lost its moral compass” in the COVID-19 pandemic as millions of healthcare workers and the populations of low-income countries remain unvaccinated, while wealthier nations race to get younger, healthy patients double jabbed.

An article on the website of the UK newspaper The Telegraph, quoting Mr Catton, says frontline healthcare staff and vulnerable people in poorer nations have been left behind as the race to vaccinate whole populations in high income countries intensifies.

The article highlights four countries - Eritrea, Burundi, Tanzania and North Korea – which have not yet started their vaccination programmes, and many more have fewer than 2% of their populations protected by the vaccine.

The article also quotes the World Health Organization (WHO) as saying that one in eight healthcare staff have still not been vaccinated, and that richer nations have administered 62 times more vaccines than poor nations. WHO is calling on them to ramp up production of the virus around the world and share more doses with low-income countries.

Mr Catton said:

“Today, nurses will be going to work in some countries knowing that they are high risk, but unvaccinated. And at the same time, in richer countries, they see unlocking, they see less vulnerable younger people getting the vaccine, people being able to go and sit on beaches for their holidays because they've been double jabbed, while they are still waiting. And they feel dispensable and disposable.

‘There are billionaires building rockets to send people into space, but we still can't vaccinate all of our healthcare workers. It feels like we've lost our moral compass on this.”

Download the communique here