India’s daily COVID-19 deaths near record
India’s total COVID-19 cases rose by over 400,000 for the fourth consecutive day on Sunday even as several states imposed strict lockdowns to curb the spread of the virus, as EU pressure mounted on Washington to end vaccine export limits and offer a concrete plan to lift patents.
India’s health ministry reported 4,092 fatalities over the past 24 hours, taking the overall death toll to 242,362. Cases rose by 403,738, increasing the total since the start of the pandemic to 22.3 million.
“I call very clearly on the US to put an end to export bans not only on vaccines but on vaccine ingredients, which prevent production,” Macron told reporters at an EU summit in Porto. He was referring to a de facto US ban on the export of vaccine raw materials. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the EU had exported much of its own production and the US should follow suit. “I do not think that a patent waiver is the solution to make more vaccines available to more people,” she said in Berlin. “Rather, I think that we need the creativity and the power of innovation of companies – and to me, that includes patent protection.”
Earlier, Pope Francis had focused on his desire to see patent waivers to “allow universal access to the vaccine.” He called for the temporary suspension of intellectual property rights, condemning the “virus of individualism” that “makes us indifferent to the suffering of others.”
The call for waivers has gained momentum after the US announced surprise support for such a scheme to enable adequate vaccine supplies to fight COVID-19.
As India battles to stem the rising tide, Africa is fretting over a potential knock-on effect regarding vaccine supplies for the continent.
“We are watching in total horror and disbelief what is going on in India and we don’t expect that vaccines will be shipped out of India anytime soon,” the Director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Cameroonian virologist Dr John Nkengasong, told an online meetings of African Union health ministers.
An African Vaccine Acquisition Task Team is hoping to acquire vaccines through its program by the end of July but Nkengasong said he hoped that date could be brought forward.
WHO president Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told the meeting that “what’s happening now in many other parts of the world can happen in our Africa if we let down our guard,” while dubbing the inequitable distribution of vaccines “not just a moral outrage. It’s also economically and epidemiologically self-defeating.”
Meanwhile, earlier Saturday, Madagascar received its first batch of vaccines through the COVAX global sharing scheme, one of the last African countries to obtain supplies.
People register for Covid-19 vaccination at Tigra Urban Primary Helth Centre (UPHC), on Friday in Gurugram, India. Photo: VCG
