Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, when speaking at the WTO´s General Council, referred to the coronavirus vaccine issue as ‘the main moral and economic one of our time.’

During the meeting, she tackled down on intellectual property issue and access to pivotal medicines and medical equipment in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.

Okonjo-Iweala claimed that the Covid-19 vaccine policy is also economic because global recovery cannot be sustained without equitable access to these drugs, therapeutics and diagnostics, for which a temporary exemption from certain related obligations to intellectual property, was proposed by India and South Africa.

The World Health Organization recently denounced that poor countries just received 0.3% of nearly one billion Covid-19 vaccine doses, and urged rich nations to choose the right path because if they keep their promises the pandemic may end. UN Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on the other hand, said that despite the record time in which science faced the pandemic, of the more than 890 million vaccine doses administered worldwide, over 81% were applied in high- and upper-middle-income countries.

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